A Roman Soldier's Sketchbook
by Mindoir
Summary: [One-Shots] This is not one story, but a collection of brainstorming and creative writing set in various franchises as well as original stories.
1. Author's Note

**Spoiler  
** Varies from chapter to chapter.

 **Rating  
** Varies from chapter to chapter.

 **Disclaimer  
** Varies from chapter to chapter.

 _ **A/N  
** Welcome to the Roman Soldier's Sketchbook, aka. my sketchbook. This is not one story, but a collection of brainstorming and creative writing set in various franchises as well as original stories. Sometimes I just get ideas in my head for new parts or completely new stories and have to write them down. I may or may not use them sometime in the future. And now I decided to share some of them with you in this sketchbook. (I hope this kind of "story" doesn't defy the guidelines.)_

 _Since the chapters are mostly based on ideas, they aren't tidied up regarding grammar and phrase and may be strange to read._

 _Please read the spoiler warning in the beginning of every new chapter to not be spoiled in a story you are reading or are going to read!_

 _If you have questions about some of the excerpts in terms of the context or if I'll add them to a story or write the story etc. feel free to ask me!_

 _have fun,_  
 _sincerely your roman soldier_  
 _~ Spliz_


	2. Original Story - I

**Spoiler  
** Original Story: Blue Blood

 **Rating  
** T

 **Disclaimer  
** From idea to completion this non-profitable project including all the characters is mine.

* * *

 **Original Story  
Working Title: Black Falcon**

"I thought you wanted to bring me to my mother, officer", I grit out through clenched teeth. It is worse enough that everybody wants me to meet the woman who didn't want me, but being played with was really the cherry on the cake.

"I am", is all he says as he parks the car in front of the maximum-security prison.

I turn towards him, my brow furrowed deeply. "She's in prison?"

He nods a single time before takes the seatbelt of and gets out of the car. I follow him swiftly and want to ask him about why, when a tall woman with long black hair strolls towards him and greets him with a bear hug.

"It is so good to see you", she mumbles with tear filled eyes into his ears.

He says nothing to that but plainly returns the hug. When they pull apart he tilts his head, "how is she?"

"I don't know, they didn't let me to her."

He scrunches his face as reaction and looks to the ground. "I'm sorry, that would be my fault", he apologizes and then directs his gaze towards me.

As soon as the woman looks at me gasps and clasps her hands in front of her mouth. "Is this…", she trails off and stumbles a step closer, holding a hand out as if I am a ghost, surreal, unbelievable.

"Yes", the officer confirms from behind her.

"She looks just like her mother", the woman whispers with a slight smile on her face.

"You know my mother?", I ask her craning a brow, completely ignoring the fact that this woman who I have absolutely no idea she could be recognizes me on an instant.

"Yes", she breaths after a second and nods, "we are old… friends." The way she says the word _friends_ indicates that she doesn't really like that term. That she wished they would be something different, but I let the matter drop. I don't really care about that anyway.

"So", I say directed back to Officer Cook, "can we get this over with?"

"Of course", the officer nods, not even reacting in any way to my clear loathness. "You wanna come, Rai?", he asks the woman, "you probably can't speak to her but you could at least see her."

The woman, obviously named Rai, nods with a wide grin across her face.

* * *

"I didn't expect you", I hear the voice through the glass but can't see her face yet. The woman stands in the dark corner of the room. "Today is Rai's day…", she says with slight disappointment in her voice, "or is it?"

"Yes", the officer says, "I'm sorry, sis." I tilt my head at the phrase. Sis as in sister? Truly, if this officer would be my uncle he would've told me so, or not?

"Don't worry", I hear Rai say from next to me, her eyes never move from the person hiding in the shadow, "they are like siblings but not actually some." I nod without acknowledging her furthermore and listen to the conversation in the other room again.

"Rai is here as well", he points behind his back to the mirror and us. Finally the woman who is supposed to be my birth mother steps out of the shadows and I realize that Rai was right. I look exactly like her. We have the same dark blonde hair, the same curls. The blue eyes with the faint green streak around the iris. The roundish face and the slightly downwards lips.

She smiles towards us, "hi, Rai."

"Hello, kora", Rai whispers back although there is no way that her voice could actually travel to the other room. I wonder for a moment what _kora_ means, it's clearly not a name but more a word in another language. Japanese maybe, I don't know.

"So, why are you here?", my birth mother asks as she sits down, "not that I'm not happy to see you, of course."

The officer sighs and turns his head awkwardly, "there's someone who wants to see you."

I scoff in the other room and shake my head, muttering "want isn't exactly the word I'd use." I decide to ignore the strange and disappointed look Rai flashes me.

"What are you talking about?", my mother laughs, it sounds shallow and broken as if it isn't used properly in ages, "the only ones who are even allowed to visit me are you, Rai and my brother."

"No, your family."

Her eyes widen in an instant and she looks at the mirror, at us again. Then she shakes her head frantically. "No", she whispers in a broken voice and then again, harsher, "no!" She turns back to the officer, her gaze grim, the brows furrowed deeply, "I told you that she should _never_ come here."

I always told myself that I don't care who my mother is, that I don't want to know about a person who didn't want me from the start, but this… This stings unexpectedly. I should never come to her? Did she really never want me?

I drop my head and decide to turn around and walk away, but Rai's hand grabs my arm. "Don't go, little Taurus", she whispers with a pleading voice.

I don't get her nickname for me and I don't know why I stop, but I do. I don't turn around again, but I stay. "It doesn't sound like she wants to see me", I grit out through clenched teeth. I know that my anger is directed at the wrong person, but I don't care.

"She wants to, believe me", at that I turn around and see sad eyes laced with truth, "the only person who knows her better than me sits inside of that room. And he'd tell you the same."

Why?, I ask myself. Not why she wants to see me but pushes me away, but more why Rai knows my mother so well. The officer is like a brother to her, she said. But what is she to my mother? "How do you know her anyway?", I finally ask.

She sighs and averts my gaze. She looks back at my mother with something in her eyes, something I can't read, but a smile crosses her face. "That's a long story", she shakes her head, still smiling, "but not mine to tell."

I accept it and walk back to the one-way glass. The two are still arguing about me. Or at least that's what I think their topic is.

"There was a reason", my mother says with tearful eyes, "you know that."

The officer nods slowly. I can't see his expression, but the way his voice sounds I assume he looks as pained as the woman, "I'm sorry. But she really needs you. She needs to listen to you. She walks a slippery road."

"Why is she incarcerated?", I suddenly ask Rai. The question never crossed my mind until now, but I really crave the answer.

"That is also not my story to tell", she says grimly and even though I don't want to push, I ask her again, I want the answer. She sighs and turns towards me. "Have you ever heard of the blue blood hunt?"

"Bits and bobs", I admit. The blue blood hunt happened about twenty-one years ago. A police officer got killed by an international drug ring and another cop was so enraged that he hunted the ring down and killed their leader. Or at least that's what I've heard. "What does a cop on a vendetta have to do with my mother?"

"Your mother was that cop", she states firmly, her eyes never leaving mine, "and the murdered officer…" The words seem to get stuck in her throat which she clears before she closes her eyes, turns around and continues in a barely audible voice, "was your father."

"What?", I croak out.


	3. Original Story - II

**Spoiler  
** -

 **Rating  
** T

 **Disclaimer  
** From idea to completion this non-profitable project including all the characters is mine.

* * *

 **Original Story  
Working Title: Blue Blood**

Rai comes closer and closer. She doesn't waver, but I do. My whole body is shaking because I don't know what to expect as she suddenly leans in and kisses me.

Her eyes are closed, but mine are wide open as she sucks at my lips and traces their rims with her tongue. I don't return the kiss, but I don't push her away either.

I won't deny that she is beautiful. God, she is. She's tall, and has dark straight hair with the slightest curls at the end. Her green eyes are toxic and always looking at everything like a predator at its prey. Or maybe she's just looking at me that way, I can't say.

She moves her hands to my hips and pulls me a little bit closer, not caring that I don't return any of her affections. Her hands move up, slowly with a faint touch across my waist, the sides of my torso until they're at my neck and entangle themselves into my hair.

After a while she pulls back, breathing heavily and smiling very faintly with a sad undertone, she opens her darkened eyes and gazes directly into mine as she leans her forehead against mine.

"I always wanted to do that", she whispers. One of her hands moves between our faces and the thumb brushes softly against my lower lip. "At least once", she sighs and pulls away completely.

I've never seen a more pained look on anybody's face than right now. She looks as if every bit of joy was drained out of her and never expected to be coming back.

"Rai…", I begin but simply don't know what to say. I know what she thinks of me. That she likes me more than a woman just likes a partner in crime or friend.

And like I said, I won't deny that she is beautiful. Aside from that also smart, funny and sassy. And if things wouldn't be as they are right now, I don't know what I'd do.

But they are that way.

"I know", she continues. Of course she knows. She can read me like an open book, she could do it from the beginning. How could I ever doubt it? "Don't worry about me", she takes a few steps back and turns around. "The only one we need to worry about is you", she says before she leaves the room. Leaves me alone.

And I realize that I don't want that.


	4. Original Story - III

**Spoiler  
** -

 **Rating  
** T

 **Disclaimer  
** From idea to completion this non-profitable project including all the characters is mine.

* * *

 **Original Story  
Working Title: The Dragon's Tears**

"You should finally wake up, Joka", the big man laughs at his queen.

"Wake up?", Joka asks him bewildered. Her purple eyes scan him dubiously as she looks up from the reports she was just reading.

"Your weird canine that follows you everywhere you go?", he shakes his head, obviously amused, "be careful with her."

"Why should I?", she discards the reports completely and folds her hands on the table, her gaze isn't wavering for a single second, "she's my most loyal subordinate."

The bulky man throws his head back and laughs once more, "only because she loves you, but as soon as she finds someone else, she'll betray you."

"She's sworn an oath, Kaljeed", Joka tells him and ignores the assumption that her personal bodyguard would love her for now, "and unlike others she doesn't take oaths lightly." Disinterested she looks down at her hands and twitches with her fingers for a few seconds, "besides, you shouldn't talk about her like that while she's listening."

"What do you mean?", Kaljeed furrows his brow, then mockingly looks around, "she's not even here."

"You said it yourself", she sighs deeply and smirks as she sees the shadows behind the bulky man who's sitting across from her slowly moving, "she follows me everywhere I go."

In the moment the queen finished the sentence, Kaljeed can feel a cold barrel pressed to his head and only a second later a very familiar and as usual cold, emotionless voice fills the air.

"I do tolerate a lot of things, Mister Alrab", she whispers barely audible, "but I'll _never_ allow some scum like you claim I'd betray my queen."

Tamara looks up and into the purple eyes of Joka to ask for her orders, she'd love to pull the trigger, hell, she killed people for less, but usually it was because it was something against the queen, not herself.

Joka seems to think for a moment, but then shakes her head very slowly, "let him go for now. I'm sure he knows to be careful about his words in the future."

Kaljeed nods eagerly as the barrel is moved away and instantly stands up. "Of course, thank you", he stammers and bows deeply before the queen, then turns around and bows, albeit by far not as deeply as before, to the bodyguard and all but runs out of the room.

Silence dominates the room as Joka simply looks back on the reports on the table. But then Tamara makes a rash comment, "at least his words had some truth."

It's quiet and mumbled, but Joka's very good ears picked those words up, of course. "What?", is all she asks, half because she isn't sure if she understood every word right and half because, if she did, she's _very_ curious to know what exactly her personal bodyguard could mean with this statement.

"Nothing, forgive me, my queen", Tamara immediately apologizes and turns around to hide in the shadows again, but Joka quickly grabs her arm and stops her.

Tamara tends to forget how fast and dangerous the queen actually is, since mostly she lets her fight. But she was, after all, trained by the queen in certain aspects, such as speed and agility.

"I think of us to have a very reliable connection", she muses. Then her voice drops, it doesn't sound like the soft voice she usually uses when talking to her bodyguard, and it's for Tamara it's unfamiliar enough to make her flinch for a second, "so please don't make me order you to tell me."

But she merely shakes the queen's hand off, faces her against, straightens and replies in her usual calm and emotionless voice, "I do not take orders from you, my queen."

Shocked by the answer, Joka finally stands up, "you are my bodyguard. My sworn protector."

"Exactly", Tamara nods, "I am sworn to protect you. Not to take your orders."

Joka's nostrils flair at that comment, because it sounds so… meaningless, as if the only reason Tamara even stays at her side is a stupid oath. She thought more of the slightly younger woman.

She surprises the bodyguard and herself by lashing out, her hand slaps across the Japanese's face and Tamara's head snaps to the side.

She doesn't feel any pain, not physically anyway. And she doesn't strike back at her either. That would be against anything, not just against her oath, but anything she believes in.

"Then go", Joka grits out through clenched teeth, her voice bathed in pure anger, her eyes are a storm and Tamara can see so many emotions on her face, emotions she sees rarely and knows, that the queen usually hides them. She is the only one to ever see the queen's emotions, but even these she's seen very rarely. It's not, even if you might think it at first, anger. It's pain, hidden behind dozens of layers of hate. "I free you of your fucking oath", she clarifies as Tamara doesn't move an inch, "now leave my rooms, civilian."

Tamara blinks, then bows to her. "As the queen wishes." She turns around and leaves, and not until now it dawns to Joka what she has just done, because it is the first time ever Tamara didn't call her _my queen_.

* * *

"I see, you haven't left, yet…", Joka says in a tone not quite decipherable.

Tamara doesn't turn around, as she stands in front of the window and gazes out into the clear night. The stars in the sky are bright, as well as the full moon. It's a beautiful night, like almost every night on this planet.

"No", she whispers back, not daring to put any emotion in her voice. It's way harder than usual.

Joka nods and slowly steps into the room, she closes the door behind her and takes a deep breath. She wants to tell herself to put her shit together, she's the fucking queen after all, but with Tamara it's never this easy.

She knows everything there is to know about the mostly quiet but very lethal bodyguard and vice versa. And they're the only persons in each other life's this applies to. Nobody else knows nearly as much about them.

"I came to apologize", Joka braces up and straightens her back. She comes closer to the soldier, but stops out of reach, not that it would really matter in case the other woman would decide to do something.

Tamara gives a weak laugh, but her voice is still neutral, "that's a first."

"I apologized before", the queen furrows her brow and tilts her head slightly. She would never admit that to anybody, but Tamara isn't just anybody.

"Not so sincerely", the soldier turns her head around and finally reveals her face and her emotions to the queen. Her eyes are sad, it looks as if she had been crying. But what breaks Joka is the fact that she doesn't even try to hide it like she usually would. Something in her broke so much that she doesn't even care if she's seen filled with pain. "Not to me", she adds barely audible.

Joka doesn't know how to reply, so after a while Tamara simply turns back around. "Let's just forget it", she says and it almost sounds like a plea.

Joka doesn't want to forget it, any of it, but right now it may not be the time to further discuss this issue. She settles for a relatively safer question instead, "will you still be my guardian?"

"Of course", she responds without hesitation, but keeps her eyes trained at the stars of the night's sky, "the fact that you free me from my oath doesn't mean anything to me. The oath ends with my death, not sooner."

"Not with my death?", Joka inquires with a hint of amusement in her voice, trying to lighten up the situation, only to see it backfire at Tamara's response.

"My oath requires my death if I fail. Should I outlive you, it won't be for long."

"Tamara-"

"Don't", the soldier holds up one hand and then sighs. She lets her head fall before she turns around completely, "you're everything I've got to live for. Everything I _want_ to live for." She takes a step closer. "Even if it wouldn't be part of the oath, I'd die after you're gone. I wouldn't know where to go without you."

Kaljeed's earlier words reappear unwanted in Joka's head, _she follows you everywhere you go… she loves you_. She looks closely at those green eyes, as always they've got a very faint red gleam around the iris, only visible to them who look long and closely enough.

The eyes speak of so many emotions. Trust, fear, pain… Desire… Love…

"You love me", it isn't a question and quite frankly she's surprised she didn't notice it sooner. And even more surprised she is that Kaljeed out of all people noticed it. That guy usually can't even read people if they tell him their emotions.

Tamara's eyes twitch for a second before she turns away again. As before Joka quickly grabs her arm, but this time she says nothing, too afraid to lose her temper again. To scream at her, or even to hit her again. She knows, she can't actually hurt her like another person, but it's not the physical pain she fears to inflict on her.

For full two minutes they're standing like that, the only audible thing is the calm breathing of them. Then Tamara sighs again, she doesn't dare to look at Joka as she replies, for the first time today with honest emotions in her voice which let it nearly break, "how could one not?"

To hear her voice so broken shocks the queen more than the confession itself. She lets go of Tamara hand and rubs her own nose for a moment. There's nothing in her mind she could possibly say in this situation, so she just grabs Tamara at her shoulders and forces her to turn around.

Normally she'd probably be overwhelmed instantly by the soldier, but not this time, which gives her the time to lean forward and crash her lips on the taller woman.

They may be from totally different worlds, but regarding knowledge, emotion, understanding, _everything_ is vice versa, after all.


	5. WarCraft - I

**Spoiler** World of WarCraft: Wrath of the Lich King

 **Rating** T

 **Disclaimer** All rights of World of WarCraft including the characters belong to Blizzard Entertainment. This product is a one-hundred percent non-profitably project.

 **A/N** I'd just like to explain the name _Missus_ in a very short manner: I don't mean the English _Mrs_. with that word. When I created the druid _Missus_ back in 2008 I rather had the latin word in mind, which means _the envoy_.

* * *

 **WarCraft  
Working Title: Storm at the Citadel**

„Why aren't you at the meeting?", my brother asks as he tries to rig up our tent, without any success whatsoever. He definitely isn't blessed with this talent; with quivering fingers he tries to piece the fabric together clumsily.

The heavy snow coming down from the sky is not really a help and already colored his usual black mane and brown fur pearly white.

He isn't wearing his armor, but instead a thick layer of sheets, desperately trying to keep warm. Suddenly he shakes his whole body heavily, causing the white snow to fall out of his coat. He sneezes, loudly enough to cause a few heads to turn around and look at him for a second, and shakes his body anew.

He isn't used to this kind of cold. I shouldn't have brought him here.

"I'm not allowed to", I answer him as I walk the last steps over to him and rip the tent out of his twitching fingers. Since I've set up tents more often than I can count it's not really any kind of challenge for me to secure the fabric across the framework. "Go to the tavern before you freeze your hoofs off."

He sneezes again, this time as agreement probably. "How can one freeze this bad even with so much fur", even his voice quivers. He brushes some of the fresh snow off his dark horns and tightens the sheets around his body.

"The cold's different up here, brother. What you feel isn't the snow, but the scourge", I clarify as I through some more fabric over the framework to make sure that the inward of the tent will stay dry and warm.

My brother suddenly quivers even more and exhales sharply. "That's not very reassuring."

I stop in my action and turn around to examine him again. By now his braided beard and pigtails are frozen solid and his crest is white with snow yet again. I sigh and make a gesture with my hands to shoo him away, "go, Missus, I'll be right behind you."

Finally the stubborn tauren turns around and tramps away. He drags his sheets with him and leaves a clearly recognizable track in the deep snow.

I snort shortly before I turn my attention back to the tent. As I want to go inside to arrange the inner setup, a wolf catches my eye.

Snow is falling out of the copper red coat as he runs towards me, something in his jaws. I whistle and the wolf's ears perks up his ears before he runs even faster. He drops the item right in front of my hoofs and pants while wiggling his tail happily.

"What's that Trey?", I whisper as I kneel down to pick up the black item. Before I reach it I realize that it's a collection of bones, a hand, to be precise, kept together by a blue glow. My blood freezes as soon as I touch the black material, causing me to retreat my hand.

A cold shiver runs down my spine, and not just because of the temperature. I shortly pet Trey between his ears, before I quickly move to pick the bones up, again. This time I don't retreat my hand, I let the frightening feeling fill my body and take a deep breath. My fingers close around the black bones so strong that I fear I'll break them.

"Come", I tell my wolf as I begin to walk to the main building of the area.

I knock against the massive wooden door and wait for a gruff "come in" before I open it and step inside, slightly bend over to not knock my head against the doorframe.

Several pairs of eyes are looking at me, some orcish, many human, and one belongs to a dwarf. "Please excuse my interruption", I apologize as soon as I step over the threshold and close the heavy door after Trey steps in behind me and sits down next to the wall. "Highlord", I say nodding to the human paladin Tirion Fordring, clad in a heavy blue and gold armor, before I turn my gaze to one of the orcs in the armor of a Kor'kron and bow slightly, "High Overlord."

The Highlord waves me nearer, so I step closer to the round table everyone in the room is positioned around. A detailed map of Icecrown is spread out on it, converted into a battle plan.

I look around the room and only now notice that none of the attendants is armed. Suddenly I feel very delighted to have left my own weaponry with my other goods at the tent, not sure if maybe a weapon ban is existing for this meeting.

It sure wouldn't surprise me. The current war against the scourge may force Alliance and Horde to work together, but that doesn't mean that the two factions will actually go so far as to trust each other.

"Who are you, tauren?", Highlord Fordring asks in almost perfect Orcish, obviously not aware that I am able to speak his language as well. His deep voice is laced with his usual kindness and yet terrifying, it contains his whole power.

"My name is Spliz Stormpaw, Highlord. I'm one of your crusaders", I elaborate, already expecting that Fordring wouldn't have recognized me. I'm only one of many, after all, and with everything that went wrong in the tournament it wouldn't have surprised me if even I would've forgotten that I was there.

"I see, my apologies. You wore a different armor at the tournament. I didn't even see your face, but I remember your name, Crusader Stormpaw", he nods. Each of his words carries respect for me, which highly surprises me. I didn't expect him to be so respectful to a mere grunt, especially a member of the Horde, but I swallow my thought down before I can accidently speak them out loud. "How may we help you?"

"They're getting closer", I cut to the chase and put the black hand down on the table. Finally the feeling that every inch of my body is frozen disappears as I let go of the bones. "My wolf found this outside of the camp."

Everyone in the room eyes the hand suspiciously, some begin to murmur, but it is the High Overlord who finally speaks up, "I'll assign my Kor'kron to patrol the boundaries and tell them to promptly report every single sighting."

"Excellent, Saurfang", the Highlord nods and then turns to one of the other humans in the room, he addresses him in the common tongue of the Alliance, "go, do the same with our guard."

The human nods shortly and salutes, "aye-aye, sir!" Then he swiftly leaves the room.

"Thank you, for the information, tauren", Fordring says to me in Orcish again, "I'll see you on the battlefield."

"You can count on me, Highlord. High Overlord", I bow to the two leaders of the battle and leave the house again, with Trey sticking closely to my heels.

As I'm outside again and feel the frosty air feel my lounges, I decide to keep my brother in the tavern company. As soon as I enter the big house, warm air approaches me and melts the snow in my black fur. I knock off the snow off my hoofs as I enter the room and shake some more out of my main.

I don't need long to spot my brother sitting on a huge bench close to the fire, still wrapped up in his sheets, with a big mug in his paws.

"You can say about the Alliance what you want", he speaks up as soon as I sit down across from him and raises his mug, "them dwarves make delicious beer." He burps shortly, but instantly starts drinking again as if his stomach doesn't revolt at all.

"No offense, but that's Dark Iron beer", I correct him with a smug smile on my face, "Dark Iron Dwarves got nothing to do with the Alliance."

"Whatever", he hiccups and shrugs, "dwarf's dwarf."

"And beer's beer", I laugh at him, but he just looks at me with a face that tells me he's definitely not agreeing with me. His nostrils quiver slightly and he snorts before he simply drinks more of his beer.

As a waitress comes to their table, I order a pork roast and two more mugs of beer. When she leaves to get the food, I lean closer to my brother and begin to whisper in a serious voice, "and be careful what you say about the Alliance around here."

"You're one to talk", he scoffs and bangs his empty mug on the table, "out of us two you're the one to have fought humans, night elves, dwarves and gnomes in battles."

"Battle", I rectify instantly, "it was only one. One that is still being fought and will probably be fought forever. Same place, new soldiers."

I never really cared much about the dispute between the Alliance and the Horde, but I am one of Cairne Bloodhood's tauren and therefor a proud member of the Horde. If my Chieftain or Warchief order me to fight, I don't ask questions. I fight.

For the same reason I went to Northrend almost two years ago and entered the Necropolis Naxxramas alongside many other soldiers.

For the same reason I entered the Trial of the Crusader, the tournament which the Highlord Fordring used to select soldiers for the war against the Lich King himself.

"So, why weren't you invited to the meeting?", he asks as the waitress brings me the food and our two beers.

"I'm just a soldier, Missus", I clarify and take the first bite, "not a Warlord or General. I've got nothing to say, I just scout and fight."

He furrows his brow in thought, "but you're a Crusader."

"An empty title", I shake my head, "means nothing but having the honor to fight alongside the Highlord and High Overlord against the Scourge." I take a big gulp of my beer and exhale, before I continue. "Look around this camp, Missus, you'll find dozens, if not hundreds of Crusaders."

"So you can't decide who gets to fight at the Citadel?", he asks and I can hear that he's trying to hide his disappointment.

"You want to fight at the Citadel?", I sigh. I hoped that he just wanted to tag along to be with his big brother, but of course I knew better. He has the blood of a soldier running through his veins, just like I do. Like our father did. Of course he wants more than to acknowledge the _beautiful_ landscape of Icecrown.

Missus doesn't answer, he merely shrugs and I sigh again, even more. "Any chance of me convincing you not to?"

"Why do you want to discourage me?", he grumbles sourly.

"I just worry about you, you're my little brother."

"Well, what do you think I felt when you sailed to the Eastern Kingdoms to fight the Alliance? Or when you sailed to Northrend and sieged Naxxramas?", he stands up and rises to his full height, his nostrils quiver with anger and he huffs as he grabs one of his black horns in frustration. "You even came back with a blade sticking out of your shoulder from that one!", he all but shouts at me. "And now you go to war again and dare to tell me I can't come with you because _you_ worry?"

I sigh, having to admit that he's right. And he may be my little brother, but he's long grown to an adult, a very capable druid. He mastered his shapeshifting a long time ago and can fight like every other soldier. He may be my little brother, but that doesn't mean that he can't be one hell of a soldier.

With a movement of my hand a ask him to sit down again, and after a few seconds of childish refusal he even complies. He sulks down and looks like the offended tauren he is right now.

"Okay", I indulge, "I'll vouch for you." His eyes instantly move up to meet mine and I can't help but smile slightly as I see his shit eating grin. "But _you_ have to convince Auragon to join us. There's no way I'll let you go off with any of those mercenary groups."


	6. Orange is the new Black - I

**Spoiler** Orange is the new Black: Law and Drugs

 **Rating** T

 **Disclaimer** All rights of Orange is the new Black including the characters belong to Netflix, Lionsgate, Jenji Kohan and Piper Kerman. This product is a one-hundred percent non-profitably project.

 **A/N** I already wrote this a while back, before the upload of Chapter 16. This was planned to be part of Chapter 16, if I would've written it the way I originally planned to write it.

Originally I wanted them to have the talk in Chapter 16, but then threw it all over and went with what's going on in there now.

* * *

 **Orange is the new Black  
Working Title: Law and Drugs**

It has been a month by now that they decided to continue things. Currently they lie in bed at Alex's apartment, facing each other, arm in arm.

Piper's eyes are closed as she slowly dozes off, her skin is crawling due to the soft touch of Alex's fingers which stroke lazily up and down her arms.

"I heart you", Alex whispers with an unsure smile and breaks the pleasant silence. Piper opens her eyes in an instant and sees a slight surprised look at Alex's face, who obviously thought that she was already asleep. But even though she was very close to it, that comment made her wide awake instantly.

"You heart me?", Piper asks, a slight chuckle escapes her lips, "is that like I love you for pussies?"

The surprised look vanishes from Alex's face and her smile turns into a slight smirk while she inches closer with her face, "say pussy again."

Again Piper has to laugh before she grows silent and stares into the green eyes with all sincerity. She thought about this a long time, since Nicky asked her the first time if she loves Alex. And even harder after Larry asked her the same question.

It's been well over two months now that she knows the brunette, and aside from their professional mismatch she feels happy whenever she's with her. When she sees her smile, when she hears her talking or when she observes her reading a book. She sure can say that she loves everything about her, not counting the drug dealing background anyway.

Slowly she moves her hand up and brushes it across Alex's cheek and jawline, moves closer with her face, their mouths almost touching before she breathes against Alex's lips, "I heart you, too."


	7. Orange is the new Black - II

**Spoiler** -

 **Rating** T

 **Disclaimer** All rights of Orange is the new Black including the characters belong to Netflix, Lionsgate, Jenji Kohan and Piper Kerman. This product is a one-hundred percent non-profitably project.

* * *

 **Orange is the new Black  
Working Title: Out of Sight, Out of Mind**

Do you know the feeling when you drank way too much and the realization hits in? When suddenly you perceive that, though not how many glasses exactly, but _way_ too many nonetheless were downed by you? When you know that by the next day you'll regret every single shot and cocktail, but at this specific moment still can't even attempt to give a fuck?

Of course you do. We all do.

I don't feel like that right now, but I feel as if I felt like that yesterday. What I feel right now is the hangover taking over my body. I feel like regretting every single shot and cocktail I drank and even more I regret not giving a fuck about it yesterday when I still had a chance to minimize the outcome.

And the worst is I don't even remember not giving a fuck. All I remember is stepping into the bar and ordering a margarita as usual. Then, black. Or white? I can't even say that. There is simply nothing but pain, throbbing pain.

I haven't even opened my eyes yet, but have the feeling that everything around me turns and sways. A small groan escapes my mouth as a beeping sound enters my ears. _Great_ , I think as I add tinnitus to the list of my complains.

But then the tinnitus gets interrupted. And starts again. And stops. And so on. I never heard of a beeping tinnitus before and I'm not sure that this is one anyway, because the weird kind of pain a tinnitus usually causes is missing. I feel a lot of pain, but not that particular one.

So finally I decide to force my eyes open and all I see is white. It's not that don't see anything and therefor everything is white, but everything I see is white. The walls, the table, my blanket. This is definitely not my bedroom.

Another noise echoes through my head. A voice, dark, soft, persistent. A man, but I can't make out the words. The voice gets louder and louder and suddenly I feel a hand on my shoulder and reality rushes over me. The voice becomes clear, chanting my name. The beeping is no tinnitus, but a machine, an ECG.

A hospital. Why am I in a hospital?

"Miss Chapman, do you hear me?", the voice asks. I want to turn my head in the voice's direction, but my muscles won't move. I want to say something, but as I open my mouth, only air escapes. "If you hear me, blink twice."

And so I do, at least that tiny bit of movement my body allows me to do.

"Great. Don't worry, your voice will come back soon enough. I'm going to ask you some simple Yes or No questions and run some tests. Yes one blink, no two blinks, okay?"

One blink.

"Very well. You're at Presbyterian hospital. Do you remember what happened?"

Two blinks.

"You've been involved in a car accident."

Car accident? No, how? I don't even have a car, why should I need a car? How should I pay a car? Have I been in a car with a friend?

I try to remember the last day, try to remember with who I was at the bar or if I met somebody there who could own a car, but I can't think of anybody or anything. Nothing comes to mind, everything is black.

"You don't remember the accident?"

Two blinks.

"Okay, that is nothing to panic about. It is actually pretty common that victims forget about their incidents."

I try to nod to show him that I understand and I can actually feel my head tilting a little bit, but than a jolt of pain rushes through my neck and causes me to halt my action.

"Whoa, keep still", the voice advises and finally I can see its face hovering above me. It's the kind face of a man in his early forties, full dark hair with few grey streaks and a five o'clock shadow. Horn-rimmed glasses lay on the bridge of his nose, a kind but at the same time empty smile graces his face. "You suffered some bruises at your neck, very likely plus a concussion. Just try to lay still, okay?" His face vanishes again, but his voice stays with me, "you feel nauseous?"

One blink.

"Headache?"

One blink.

"Okay, I'd ask you about any other pain but we'll wait for that until you can speak fully. Or is there anything so painful you need to address it instantly?"

I hesitate for a second but then mouth a "no" at the doctor. He then touches some parts of my body. Arms, fingers, legs, asks if I feel anything or if it hurts. I'm glad that I seemed to be able to feel every tiny brush of his fingertips of my skin.

"There are some people in the waiting room, do you want to see them?", he asks after he ran all his tests with me.

I open my mouth again and breath out a very shaky "who?"

"If I got it right, your parents, brother, fiancé and a small brunette."

At that I furrow my brow. My parents I understand, with my brother he probably means Cal, since Danny is at the other side of the states. The small brunette can only be Polly. But fiancé? I don't have a fiancé.


	8. Orange is the new Black - III

**Spoiler** Season 1

 **Rating** T

 **Disclaimer** All rights of Orange is the new Black including the characters belong to Netflix, Lionsgate, Jenji Kohan and Piper Kerman. This product is a one-hundred percent non-profitably project.

 **A/N** This is the translation of the prolog of the story _Alles auf Anfang_ I've been writing. I already translated this part back then because originally I wanted to translate it all and then continue writing the story in English. But then I got the idea for _Law and Drugs_ and well… The rest is pretty much history.

* * *

 **Orange is the new Black  
Working Title: Full Reset**

Red.

That's all I could see.

A red face beneath me, my red fists beating it, a red dress made out of bedsheets, my red uniform and the red snow.

I felt as if I was intoxicated, I didn't even realize what I did as I hit and hit and hit. More red splashed through the air coloring skin, fabric and snow.

Not until I heard the heavy steel door open I stopped my fist in midair and grasped what all the red was.

Blood.

And it was everywhere.

"Inmate!", officer Bell called with her harsh voice but I didn't react. My gaze was fixed on Pennsatucky's face. If I wouldn't have known who I bend above, I wouldn't have recognized her. Her face was flooded by blood and filled with several wounds. Her mouth hung slightly open so I could see that a lot of her rotten teeth were missing.

"You're out of bounds!", Bell continued and began to walk in my direction. I still ignored her, now staring shocked onto my own hands flooded with blood, with crushed knucklebones and clenched into fists. I raised my head disturbed and acknowledged the officer for the first time in these minutes. I wanted to say something, anything, but I couldn't. All I did was staring at her.

Suddenly the stern look on Bell's face changed into dismay. Only now she seemed to notice that I wasn't the only one kneeling in the snow. Her eyes were fixed on my fists, then wavered to Pennsatucky's face and finally soaked up all the blood which was scattered around the terrain and our clothes.

She rapidly grabbed her radio. "This is Officer Bell, I need immediate backup in the yard!"

I didn't need long to realize that I was in deep trouble and raised my hands above my head. Bell ran the last few feet over to me, tugged me off the motionless body and pushed me face first in the cold snow.

I didn't try to resist. Besides of the fact that my body didn't react to any of my instructions anyway, my brain knew that every little movement could have had fatal aftereffects.

Again I heard the steel door opening and a few steps coming closer but I couldn't see anything because my face was still pressed into the snow. Bell kneeled with one knee on my back to push me down and prevent any of my movements. She grabbed my hands and yanked them behind my back to chain them.

"Oh my god", I could hear Bennett whispering.

"What happened?", O'Neill asked between heavy breaths.

Nobody answered the big officer's question but I could feel that the pressure Bell put onto my back was decreasing and someone pulled on my arms.

"Get up, Chapman!", Bell commanded. The other two officers took sharply breaths, obviously surprised at who was liable for Pennsatucky's condition. But I didn't move. I wanted to but I just couldn't.

Bell yanked at my arms and told me to stand up again and finally another pair of hands grabbed my second arm. With united force Bell and O'Neill yanked me onto my feet but my legs yielded under my body's weigh and I slumped into the arms of the two officers.

They didn't care about my condition any further and simply dragged me still holding onto my arms back into the building. My feet skittered across the floor and I dropped my head. My blonde hair hung in front of my face like a curtain, separating me from the world around me.

I could hear a lot of whispering until the alarm, which ordered the inmates to lie down on the floor, blared but it wasn't long until another officer's voice echoed through the speakers.

"Inmates; return to your assigned bunks immediately! I repeat; Inmates; return to your assigned bunks immediately!"

"Chapman?", someone asked with a voice full of shock, which made me to raise my head for the first time since Bell and O'Neill lifted me up and I stared directly into Nicky's wide opened eyes.

Though when I saw who stood beside her, her eyes also filled with a mix of confusion, shock and other emotions, I dropped my gaze again without saying anything. I just weren't able to look at Alex and was glad that I got dragged further without any interruption.

"Go to your bunks, inmates", O'Neill ordered them as we moved past them because they couldn't tear themselves away from the picture of me, covered in blood and shackled, being dragged through the halls of the prison.


	9. Orange is the new Black - IV

**Spoiler** -

 **Rating** M

 **Disclaimer** All rights of Orange is the new Black including the characters belong to Netflix, Lionsgate, Jenji Kohan and Piper Kerman. This product is a one-hundred percent non-profitably project.

* * *

 **! Trigger Warning for Child Maltreatment !**

* * *

 **Orange is the new Black  
Working Title: Silent Cry**

Faint sobs echo through the room, barely audible over the wind breezing through the rotten roof. It is dark, after midnight, no moon is visible as the clouds hide him behind. It's also cold, outside and inside, it doesn't matter. The heating never worked in the attic, the roof was always damaged, the windows could never be closed completely.

But even though the small body pressed against the far wall is shivering with cold, rubbing thin arms across short legs and burying the face in knees, the girl doesn't dare to even twitch, feeling safe in this fetal position.

She won't move, she won't make a noise - Aside from the uncontrolled sobbing anyway - and she won't leave the safety of this room especially. Because she knows. She knows who is downstairs.

She was lying in her bed when he came home from work. Short after her mother had to leave. She tucked her in, she kissed her on the forehead and she promised her that it'll get better soon. The same ritual as every night.

And the same as this blissful ritual with her mother, the horrible ritual with her father was about to occur. She knew that when she was lying in her bed, her breath controlled, her ears alert. She wanted to believe what her mother promised her every single night so bad, but she knew better.

She didn't dare to fall asleep, instead she listened and as soon as she heard the front door crack open, she threw the blanket aside and stood from the bed. She tiptoed to the door of her room, opened it slightly and peered out.

She could hear him grumbling and she could see him swaying towards the kitchen. His footsteps echoed in the house due to his heavy boots on the cheap wooden floor. He's plain drunk, as always.

She heard him rummaging in the kitchen and knew what he was about to do. But it didn't take long for his grumbling to grow louder instead of quieter.

"Oh no", she whispered and her eyes got wide when she realized what must've caused his sudden change from drunk and unbearable to furious.

As fast and quiet as she could she hopped out of her room and sneaked towards the stairs, a very hard task because even under her humble weight the wood tend to squeak with every step. Especially the stairs.

"Where is it?", she heard him scream in rage. He seemed to throw stuff through the kitchen because she could hear glass break.

But she didn't stop in her actions, she swiftly climbed up the stairs until she reached the attic and hid in her typical space.

And now she sits here, trying not to think about the man downstairs who shouts her name. She moves her quivering hands up to her head and holds them against her ears, now only hearing the rush of her own blood.

She closes the eyes and tries to think of anything to distract herself in hope that it'll just fade away. That he'll stop searching her in his rage. But who is she kidding? He always finds her. This time is no exception.

"There you are", he grumbles, causing her to open her eyes and snap her head up. Her vision gets immediately blurrier with every step the tall man takes towards her. "Where is it?", he asks her with so much rage in his voice, his words slurred.

"I don't know what you mean", she instantly answers panic stricken. It's a bland lie, of course she knows what he means, what he was searching in the kitchen. But she doesn't know where it is. It wouldn't surprise her if he used all of it and simply forgot.

He's now only a few inches away from her as he screams his words again, much louder, "where the fuck is it?!" He grabs her at her hair and yanks her on her feet, completely ignoring the painful sobs and yelps his daughter wails.

"I don't know", she cries, tears now streaming down her face. She closes her eyes just in time before the first blow lands on her cheek.

This is new, he never hit her before. Previously he would've just yelled at her for various reasons. Or just no reasons at all. And after a while he would've just walked away.

"Don't you dare lie to me!" A second blow lands at her midsection, her breathing interrupted. For a moment all she feels is pain, the world around her grows even darker as the brain begins to beg her body for the much needed oxygen.

When she finally fills her lungs with air again, she realizes that he released the hold on her and that she's now lying on the floor again. He's staring down at her and she swiftly averts her gaze.

"Go to your room", he orders her in a gruff voice, but the rage seems to be gone for now. So she complies, scurries to her feet and hurries down the stairs.

She snuggles up into her bed, returns to her fetal position and continues her silent cries, sobbing for her mother to return home. Just as every night.


	10. Mass Effect - I

**Spoiler** Mass Effect 1, Mass Effect 2

 **Rating** T

 **Disclaimer** All rights of Mass Effect including the characters belong to BioWare and Electronic Arts. This product is a one-hundred percent non-profitably project.

* * *

 **Mass Effect  
Working Title: Broken Phoenix**

"What is that?", Liara asks irritated as she looks at the small cage on the upper shelf in the commander's quarters.

The tiny mammal which occupies the cage curiously gazes at the much taller asari, his tiny paws leaned against the clear glass. His nose is trembling as he sniffs the air, trying to figure out who and what this person next to his owner is. As Liara suddenly leans closer, he gives a jerk and scurries back into his wooden house.

Shepard emits a small chuckle at the scene before she answers the asari's question. "That's a hamster."

"A hamster?", Liara furrows her brow and tries to get a second look at the frightened animal, which bravely sticks his tiny nose out of the house again to observe the interaction of the two much taller beings.

"Yeah. Hamsters are small mammals, rodents. From earth."

"What is their purpose?"

"Nothing, really", Shepard shrugs, "they're common pets. Like fishes often used as first pets for kids, 'cause they're easy to maintain and don't live longer than three years." She takes a step closer to the cage and opens its hatch, before she holds her hand inside of it.

Recognizing the familiar scent of his owner, the rodent creeps out of his house completely and carefully nibbles at the cocoa colored pinky. "But you're more than that, right, lil guy?", Shepard mumbles in a higher voice than usual as she shifts her hand so that she can pet the furry neck of the rodent. "My little Cerberus, ready to defend my fortress."

"Cerberus?", Liara inquires bewildered. Why would Shepard name her pet after that disgusting human terrorist organization?

"Yeah", the woman huffs as answer as she takes her hand out of the cage and closes it again, "that has nothing to do with those assholes, Liara. Cerberus is the guard dog of hell in old Greek mythology."

"I see. Well, I'm sure he is a… magnificent fighter."

Shepard smiles slightly at the faint streak of dry sarcasm Liara finally got used to not only acknowledge, but actually use herself by now.

"Did you have a hamster as child?"

"No…", Shepard is silent for a moment and avoids Liara's eyes, her angry gaze, filled with old memories laced with pain, instead fixed on the mammal running around in his cage, squealing in excitement. Her voice is growing cold, a tone Liara is used to very much, but didn't hear it directed towards her in a long time, "not really a pet for a street rat, you know?"

"Jane…", Liara whispers and carefully lays a blue hand on top of arm clothed with the Commander's famous N7 hoodie jacket. She puts a tiny bit of pressure on the woman until she turns around and lifts her green eyes up to Liara's blue ones.

"Sorry", she says and lays her own dark skinned hand on top of the blue one. She grips it and carefully pries it off her, but doesn't let go of it, "didn't mean to sound like that."

"And I didn't mean to make you feel like that."

The two stand together in silence for a few seconds before Shepard starts to smile, losing herself in faint memories, "I did have a dog, though. Ironically enough it was a shepherd."

"What's a shepherd?"

"A large dog originally bred to herd sheep and alike. Mine was a German Shepard; strong, faithful, with brown and black fur. Their purpose shifted to police and military work in twentieth century. But after humans started to use mechs instead of dogs for all of that, one of the most common dog breeds became one of the most useless", Shepard shakes her head slowly, her sad eyes drop to their joined hands, "I found a couple of pups when I was eleven, just tossed out on the street, left to die. I guess, I simply felt related to them, so I took them to a vet, but only one made it out alive. The vet couldn't take him in, though, so I kept him. He was my most faithful companion for almost seven years."

"What was his name?"

"Tapfer."

"That doesn't really sound like a name", Liara inquires carefully with a small smile. She still isn't that much used to human history and culture, but is pretty sure that she never heard of a name like that.

"Because it isn't. The vet I brought him to was speaking German while examining him. _Tapfer_ was the word she repeated most. It means brave."

"I bet he lived up to it."

"Yeah… He did."


	11. Mass Effect - II

**Spoiler** Mass Effect 3, Omega DLC

 **Rating** T

 **Disclaimer** All rights of Mass Effect including the characters belong to BioWare and Electronic Arts. This product is a one-hundred percent non-profitably project.

* * *

 **Mass Effect  
Working Title: Broken Phoenix**

"I found another one!", a deep voice calls from somewhere else.

Bray looks up from the dead body in front of him for a second and turns his four eyes to the source of the voice. "Dead or alive?"

"No fucking clue. Can't tell with these squishy humans."

Bray sighs and shakes his head, why he's always stuck with those retards is way beyond his comprehension. He turns his gaze back to the dark skinned human to his feet. The man wears the armor of a Systems Alliance soldier. The four bars of an admiral are printed on his chest plate and sewn to the front of his camo colored cap.

He's obviously been dead long before Bray and his team got send out to look for any survivors. Why Aria chose to get them doing that, he isn't aware of. And frankly, he doesn't really care either way. He gets his orders, he executes them.

He turns to one of his men, "pack him up." The other batarian nods and spreads one of the many body bags they carry with them out on the ground.

Bray himself walks away from the dead admiral and to the other human. It's a woman, so much he can tell instantly as he sees the torso sticking out of the debris.

Long black hair is spread across her dirty and bloody face. Her black armor is torn apart by what many wounds are visible. The dark skin is burned or slashed at various places, bones seem to be broken and everywhere is blood. But he thinks he can see the broken chest plate rise and fall at a small but steady rate.

He kneels down in front of her and touches the skin on the woman's neck, knowing that this is the best way to feel a pulse of a human. A faint pounding streaks through his fingers. "She's alive", he says and then takes a closer look to her face.

The strands of hair block the view of her facial features, so he wipes them away and tilts his head. Old scars and new wounds litter the dark skinned face. He forces one of the eyes open and a green iris with a faint red glow gazes empty up to him. This human seems awfully familiar to him.

Searching for a dog tag, human soldiers always carry on their necks, he realizes why. He fought alongside with this woman on Omega. This is not just any human soldier. It's Commander fucking Shepard.

"Get a medic, now!", he orders the turian who found her lying here and now races back to the other men. If there's one thing he knows that it's to better not let the human's hero die.

He stands back up and begins to move the debris off her broken body. When the turian comes back with a human medic at his side, he moves out of the way to let him do his job and contacts Aria on his omni-tool instead.

Barely two seconds later a holographic picture of Omega's queen is floating in the air above his left arm. "What?"

"We found Shepard", he cuts to the chase, knowing that Aria doesn't like if people beat around the bush and probably wants to know about this. She may not ever admit it, but Bray is pretty sure that Aria is somewhat fond of this soldier. After all she helped her more than once, asked for her assistance to take back Omega and Bray did notice the way she surprised Shepard with a kiss after killing Petrovsky. He isn't sure how far her likeliness of the human goes, but its sheer existence is undeniable.

Her attractive features darken instantly, she narrows her eyes and her voice turns an octave deeper, "is she alive?"

"Barely", he nods.

"Get her to Huerta's", she orders him.


	12. Mass Effect - III

**Spoiler** -

 **Rating** T

 **Disclaimer** All rights of Mass Efefct including the characters belong to BioWare and Electronic Arts. This product is a one-hundred percent non-profitably project.

* * *

 **Mass Effect  
** **Working Title: Broken Phoenix**

"Commander?", the soft voice of Liara fills my ears as I pour some coffee into my mug.

I turn my head around to face the young asari. She's standing behind me, her deep blue eyes averted from me although she approached me in the first place. She nervously fidgets with her hands how she always does, as I noticed after a while, when she's talking or asking about something embarrassing. "Mh?", I turn fully to her, lean on the counter behind me with my left hand and sip my coffee, waiting for her to ask whatever is on her mind.

"You said, I can ask you anything… Personal?"

I narrow my eyes and nod slowly. After she told me, she read that I survived the raid on Mindoir at age eleven, I practically ordered her to ask me if she wants to know something about me, instead of snooping behind my back.

Finally she looks at me, her blue eyes directed at my own green. "I wondered about… The origin of your scar."

I raise one of my eyebrows at the question. It's not really an odd question, though there aren't many people who ask about any of my scars. But considering the amount of scars, even visible scars with clothing that covers most of my body, littering my skin, it's a very unspecific question. "Which one?"

She drops her eyes again and it takes me a moment to realize that she isn't just averting my gaze again, but rather staring at my left hand on the counter.

I take it off the surface and look at the pattern across the skin myself. The scar tissue is mostly on my palm, but here and there some streaks reach out to the edges of the back of the hand.

"It's a fire scar", I explain and hold my hand out for her to view it from up close. Soft blue fingers brush against the scar tissue and send a pleasant shiver through my body, causing me to tremble slightly.

"I'm sorry", misinterpreting my body's reaction, Liara pulls her fingers away from me. "Does it hurt?"

"No", I answer with a slight smile and after thinking about it decide to tell her more about it, wondering what she'd think about me. "It never did."

"I don't understand."

"I had congenital analgesia as a kid", I explain her with sigh and, upon seeing her confused look, laugh slightly. "And here I thought you're a doc."

"I fear my doctorate is hardly sufficient for medical terms - human ones at that", she says with a slight blush.

"I'm just messing with you", I say with a kind smile. I have to admit that it's kind of cute how Liara takes everything literally and doesn't pick up any sarcasm at all. It's really hard to believe how someone who already lived a hundred years can be so naïve, but then again, in asari terms, she's barely an adult.

"You seem to enjoy that a lot", she inquires somewhat unsure, but I don't answer, just smile at her. "So, what is congenital analgesia?"

Before I can answer, Doctor Chakwas surprises both of us, obviously having listened into our conversation. "It's a very rare and to date untreatable condition in which a person is physically unable to feel pain."

"Well, not entirely untreatable, as it turned out, but I wouldn't recommend the treatment necessary to heal it", I remark with a slight quiver at the memory of the night I actually felt pain for the very first time.

"So, you got burnt but didn't feel any pain?", Liara asks, piecing together the few information Chakwas and I gave her. "That must be weird."

"In retrospect a bit, yes. But at that point?", I shake my head and sigh. "I've never known pain so I've never known what I should've felt. My skin was just burning. It felt slightly warm and the smell was awful, but that's about it." After a short pause I gave a weak dry laugh, lacking much of actual humor. "My mother panicked when she saw it. Ripped my hand away from the fire and screamed at me that I'm crazy."

Liara furrows her brow, then widens her eyes and stares at me perplexed. "You did it on purpose?"

I stare at her for a single second, contemplating. There aren't many people who know about these things. Doctor Chakwas is one of the few, so I don't really mind that she's standing there.

Anderson is another one, though talking with him about it was never as easy as talking with the doctor about this stuff, probably because he wasn't able to turn off his protective instinct if it was about my personal well-being, in contrary to Chakwas who was, although as concerned about me as he was, capable of viewing everything in a clinical manner, tuning feelings out for the moment.

Everyone else is either dead, like my family, or hasn't been part of my life in years.

I'm not ashamed of it, not really, but it's nothing I'm proud of either. I simply prefer to keep some of my secrets hidden in the past instead of telling them everybody who's asking. And as a soldier especially a secret involving scars is very easy to hide, because all you have to do is build a fancy story of how you got injured in a fight.

But there's something in the asari's eyes that makes me want to tell her the truth, makes me want to trust her. So I nod curtly, not missing the faint flicker of surprise in Chakwas' eyes. "Yes." When she just keeps looking at me, obviously not comprehending how I could've done something like that, I decide to elaborate. "I was ten and basically just… Curious... About how it would feel."

"I see", she answers after a short time, then averts her eyes and fidgets with her fingers again, I can practically sense that she wants to ask another question, but don't dare to push her to it. However I notice that Chakwas makes an exit to the med-bay after locking eyes with me for a moment. I'm not really sure, what she's trying to tell me with that. But it looked something like… Encouragement?

"Liara?", I finally ask her after another full minute of silence. I wait for her to look up at me before I continue. "Just say what's on your mind."

She reaches out and takes my hand into hers, her thumb brushes against the rough pattern once again. "Do you have more scars like this one?"

"Burn scars?"

"Self-inflicted scars", she clarifies.

"Some", I answer honestly with a shrug, careful not to move my hand out of her grasp. "No other burns, lots of cuts though."

"Where?"

"Everywhere?", I shrug again. "Mostly on my arms. Some on the legs. Few are scattered on my torso as well."

"Is that why you always wear long sleeves?", she asks me and I'm partly shocked at the question. I wouldn't have thought that Liara would draw that kind of connection. Noticing my reaction, she continues. "I noticed how most of the other soldiers roll their sleeves up, but you never do. Not even when it's hot. I always wondered about it."

"People tend to stare", I reason. It's a safe argument, it doesn't reveal anything about my personal feelings on this matter.

"May I?", she asks and only now I notice that her hand has moved up to the end of my left sleeve. Without really thinking about it I nod.

While Liara moves the sleeve up my arm, I keep my eyes locked on her face, taking in her expression. It isn't shocked, disgusted, disapproving, or basically negative in any manner, but instead intrigued. I can feel her fingers brush against various scars on my forearm.

"Why have you never let remove them?"

"They're part of me", I explain. "Part of what I came from and who I am now. Removing them would be", I hesitate for a moment and chuckle at the only word that comes to my mind at this point. "Too painful."

"But you hide them", she faces me again and I can see clear confusion in her eyes. Confusion I very well understand, I'd probably confused as well if somebody told me, he wouldn't be able to part from scars he can't bear.

"I do", I agree, take my arm out of the asari's grasp and move my sleeve back down. "Like I said, people tend to stare."

"I'm sorry", she mumbles and takes a step back. Instantly I realize that I probably sounded a bit too cold saying it like that, especially directly after Liara examined the scars more closely.

"It's okay, really", I try to smile reassuringly, not sure if it's working, though.

"I should probably head to bed", Liara says after a few seconds, her eyes are directed everywhere but at me again. "Goodnight, Commander." She turns around and slowly walks to the med-bay.

"Night", I mumble, staring at the door, even long after she retreated.


	13. Mass Effect - IV

**Spoiler** -

 **Rating** T

 **Disclaimer** All rights of Mass Efefct including the characters belong to BioWare and Electronic Arts. This product is a one-hundred percent non-profitably project.

 **A/N** I wrote this little piece once I finished drawing a picture of my Shepard - You can look it up on _spliz94-DOT-deviantart-DOT-com_.

* * *

 **Mass Effect  
** **Working Title: Broken Phoenix**

She looks up from the gun and lets her eyes wander over the blood soaked battlefield. Countless bodies litter the ground, most of them are batarians.

That brings a small smile to her face as she slowly rises back to her feet and tucks the knife away, before gripping her shotgun again, ready to continue the fight.

Slowly she begins to walk, not caring if what she steps on is dead flesh or broken debris.

She's at counter forty-three when she sees _his_ face far away. She'd recognize it everywhere and always, even fifty years from now she'd still be able to tell him apart from all the other batarians. She sneers, tightens the grip on the shotgun and begins to jog, then sprint, then charge.

She screams with fury as she summons the biotic energy and catapults herself dozens of meters forth. She smashes into the batarian's head with the handle of her shotgun, before shooting him in the gut from close range. As he lies on the ground, not heaving expected such a sudden attack, she kicks him into the new wound.

He coughs and tries to stand up, but she won't let him and slams her foot down on his chest.

"Brakis Daprovan", she spits in his face and points the barrel of her weapon at one of his eyes.

For a second he seems bewildered that a human soldier knows his name, but then he laughs, knowing who the woman standing above him is. "Hello, Sara", he greets her with a deep voice in a mocking tone.

She instantly leans closer and hits him in the side of his face with the shotgun once, before pointing the barrel back at an eye. "Don't call me that." She stresses each word as her eyes narrow.

Her finger is twitching, only waiting for her brain to command the shot, but something is holding her back.

The glee.

Oh, how often has she dreamt of this moment, when she can finally kill the bastard who's responsible for her family's death thirteen years ago.

But somehow, just killing him doesn't feel enough. She wants it to be slowly, and painful.

"What are you waiting for, Sara?", he mocks her with another laugh, which causes her to get even angrier.

His use of her first name is already painfully ringing in her ears, but this laugh, this sick laugh… It's the same way he laughed when he killed her parents.

She moves her shotgun forward and the barrel begins to drill into the eye of the batarian. He screams with pain as his eyeball bursts and blood begins to seep out of the socket.

She raises herself again and moves her foot from his chest, only to slam it back down, this time into his face. He grunts as soon as the hard plating of her shoe connects with his unprotected skin.

She bores the foot deeper into the side of his face and keeps pressing, the force enhanced by raw biotic power.

"Sleep tight", she whispers upon hearing the skull under her foot crack and the screams of agony increase.

It's music to her ears.


	14. Mass Effect X Fringe - I

**Spoiler  
** Mass Effect 3  
Fringe Season 1-4

 **Rating  
** T

 **Disclaimer  
** All rights of Mass Effect including the characters belong to BioWare and Electronic Arts. All right of Fringe including the characters belong to Warner Bros. Television and Bad Robot Productions. This product is a one-hundred percent non-profitably project.

 _ **A/N  
** This is how I first wrote the second chapter of my Mass Effect X Fringe Crossover; solely in Olivia's point of view. But I soon realizied that I'm not really content with the chapter in general. With the take on it, writing as Olivia, the happenings. So I threw it all over, and rewrote the chapter in Shepard's point of view._

* * *

 **Mass Effect X Fringe  
Working Title: So much for Retirement**

"Olivia Dunham", she identifies herself, holding her FBI ID up so that the officer can see it. The man swiftly inspects it with a flashlight before he nods and steps away from the car.

"Go ahead, it's hard to miss", he says and points into the direction where Olivia can already see the large wreck of… something…

The well over seven-hundred-fifty feet long and seventy-five feet high plane-like shape must have crashed into the Soldiers and Sailors Monument; debris of the column is scattered around the park, and there's a long, wide trail, looking like the dirt was plowed up.

After driving close enough, she, as well as Peter, exits the car and examines the construct. "Just what is that thing?", Olivia mumbles, while stepping closer to the people working around it.

Giant spotlights illuminate the mostly white hull with blue and black coloring. A strange symbol with two arcs and three stars is positioned on the side of the hull and on what looks like wings. The blocky written word _Normandy_ and the combination _SR2_ adorn the surface as well.

This ting looks very much like a vessel out of a sci-fi movie, with no apparent engines or windows, not even a cockpit visible.

"Some kind of aircraft?", Peter suggests in a questionable tone, obviously thinking the same as her. "It came crashing down, after all", he reasons and turns his head up into the pitch-black sky.

"Dunham!", the deep voice of Agent Broyles hollers from the side, causing Olivia and Peter to snap their heads and then walking up to him.

"Sir", she nods at him. "What do we got?"

"Around two a.m. the police got several calls reporting a plane crash. At the same time all of north Boston as well as parts of Cambridge and Brookline went dark, no electricity whatsoever. It was accompanied by, what people describe as, earthquake like shaking", he begins explaining and leads them towards a big tent. "The grid was back on pretty fast, without anybody doing anything, really. And when authorities reached the park, they found… _This_." He vaguely gestures towards the strange object of question. "It seems mostly undamaged and wasn't on fire, but sensors picked up enormous heat signatures, so they started to cool down the hull anyway."

Olivia nods without saying anything at all. That they cooled it down definitely explains the clean condition of the thing. "That's not really much", she says after a couple of seconds of pure silence.

"No", Broyles agrees.

"Is there any way to get inside of that thing?"

"Maybe", he nods and pulls out a sketch from one of the tables in the tent. "They think that here", he points at the front of the sketched aircraft. "Is some kind of door, but are unsure of how to open it."

"Well then, let's find out", Peter moves forward and studies the sketches in front of him closer, while talking to Broyles and some of the other people around.

Olivia meanwhile steps out of the tent again and steps closer to the object in question. After a while of staring at it, she rubs her eyes, looks to the side and then back at the hull again. "Hey, Peter?", she calls for him, her eyes never moving from the spot.

"Yeah?", he jogs towards her.

"Do you see that, too?"

"What?", he asks and turns his eyes to the hull now as well. His brows furrow in deep concentration.

"That… glimmer."

"Glimmer?", he turns back to her again. "You mean this is from the other side?"

"No, this is different. Blueish. Sort of."

He turns his head back to the hull and, after a few seconds, frowns deeply. "Maybe", he mumbles, then nods, and steps closer to it, until he's barely a foot away. He reaches out to touch the metallic surface, but jerks his hand away before his fingers reach it.

"Peter!", Olivia shouts and runs to him, thinking that touching the hull somehow hurt him, but he shakes his head at her.

"Look", he says and reaches out again. As soon as he's almost touching the surface, the glimmer becomes stronger around his fingers, then he crosses it and puts his palm at the hull. "I think this is some kind of energy field." He walks along the hull, his palm still touching the surface, and the glimmer seems to follow him, always present around his skin.

"What's it for?"

"I have absolutely no idea", he finally pulls away from it again and walks back to the car to get some equipment. He sets up a tripod and puts some sort of camera connected to a small monitor in his hands to it.

"What's that?", Olivia asks while looking on the monitor.

"Energy", he mumbles again and tilts the screen slightly to her. "See that?" The camera records a fragment of the front of the aircraft, its shape visible in grey, surrounded by the same blueish glow. "There's energy all around the ship, firmly pressed into shape", he explains and turns the camera slightly. When the picture shows a higher concentration of blue, he stops the camera. "And there's the source. It's like an… engine."

"So you say, whatever this glow is, is what made that thing fly?"

"No, that's unlikely", he shakes his head and gazes between the screen and the real shape. "I've never seen energy quite like this."

"Is it dangerous?"

"Not as far as I can tell", he shrugs his shoulders.

[…]

* * *

Finally inside of the strange thing, Olivia looks around. She's standing in a short gangway with a small room to her left, looking very much like a cockpit, and a longer corridor to her right.

She's going into the cockpit first, frowning when she notices two motionless bodies slumped into the chairs. The skin of the female body is completely silver, slightly shimmering when she's illuminating it with her flashlight. The man wears a blue cap with the golden lettering _SR2_ stitched on it. He's wearing some sort of black and blue uniform, but she's never seen this type of uniform anywhere before.

She reaches out to his neck to feel his pulse and then calls for some medics as she notices the faint beating in the carotid. She tries to feel the pulse of the silver woman as well, but the skin is completely cold.

She turns around and walks along the aisle, to her left and right are more seats lined up, all face the seemingly blank wall, two of them are occupied by dead men, clad in the same uniform as the man in the cockpit.

At the end of the aisle a short flight of steps down lead into a bigger room with more seats along the hull, all of them empty, and a big counter-like construct in the same shape of the logo on the skull in the middle of it.

"The structure looks like on a military ship", she mutters to Peter who's silently walking behind her. "Minus the tech."

At the far end of the room, Olivia can see another person, a woman, slouched to the ground, leaning against the wall. She has dark skin and black hair, and looks worse than all of the others combined. She's covered in dirt, bruises and dried blood, what can't possibly all come from the crash. She doesn't wear a uniform like the rest, but instead some sort of strange black and heavily damaged hard-suit. There's some kind of blocky weapon holstered at her hip as well.

Olivia crouches down in front of her and reaches out to feel her pulse as well. As soon as her fingers connect with the battered skin, the woman's right arm moves up, her hand grips the agent's wrist tightly, causing her to yelp in surprise and pain. The hold on her is stronger than any human should be able to pull off, and she's pretty sure she's going to have a heavy bruise just from the grip alone.

The woman's eyes snap open at the same time and look directly at Olivia. They are literally glowing in a deep red, illuminating the darkness, causing a shiver running down the agent's spine. She frowns up at Olivia for a moment before her eyes soften slightly and the red begins to vanish slowly, leaving a bright emerald behind. "Liara", she croaks out before she loses her consciousness again.

"Olive, you alright?", Peter calls from the other side of the room upon hearing her help.

Olivia doesn't react, she's still staring at the woman, wondering what just happened, before she reaches out again. This time the woman doesn't move as her fingers connect with the warm skin. But she can't feel a pulse.

"We need an AED, fast!", she shouts behind her where some medics entered the plane to take care of the few people who are still alive.

She pries the woman away from the wall and lies her down on the ground, moving her own ear down to the cracked lips, but she can't hear her breathing at all.

"What's wrong?", Peter asks as soon as he's kneeled down next to her.

"She woke up for a second, but has no pulse anymore", the agent explains as she tries to get the weird armor off of the woman. Somehow she's able to yank off the chestplate. "Damnit", Olivia mutters as she sees what she's wearing underneath the armor.

"What?"

"Ever tried to get through Kevlar?"

"Well, it's gotta have a zipper or something", Peter says as he pulls off the shoulder guards and gauntlets as well. He then lifts her upper body and rips off the armor on the back with a grunt. There's a fastener along the spine and beneath it a zipper.

He pulls it down the whole length of the spine before lying the torso back to the ground and takes the Kevlar off. The first thing Olivia notices is the ball chain around the neck with dog tags and a ring dangling from it. She takes it from her as Peter just brushes the tags aside and rips the compression shirt open, the last piece of garment covering the naked dark skin, except for a sports bra.

As Peter begins with the CPR, switching between heart massage and mouth-to-mouth respiration, Olivia takes a closer look to the necklace. The ring dangling from it looks very expensive, being woven from different metals, though she can't tell what kind of metals, with a bright blue gem not quite looking like anything she's seen before.

She disregards the ring for now and moves on to the dog tags. On one side there're two symbols engraved. One of them is the same symbol as on the ship, the other is a row of lines forming a V above a circle. She doesn't recall this symbol from anywhere either.

Then she turns the tag over. "Commander Sara J. Shepard", she reads the engraved information about this woman. "She's a soldier."

"They probably all are", Peter grunts as he once again presses his hands down on the woman's torso, stopping when a medic pushes him aside and kneels down, continuing with the CPR while the second medic pulls out the AED.

He sets the power, then rubs the two electrodes at each other and, after shouting "clear!", presses them down on the torso as soon as the other medic stops the massage.

The body jerks and with a loud scream instantly explodes into a blue wave of pure energy, throwing all of them away. The two medics fly in opposite directions and come to a hold as they both hit the hull. Peter is flung towards the gangway and lands on his back, whereas Olivia is caught by the railing behind her.

As she looks up, she sees the commander standing there, something looking like a strange pistol aimed at her. Her eyes are glowing again, but this time not only them. A crisscross of red lines shines through the whole of her visible skin.

She's also engulfed in a blue glow, as she's breathing heavily while looking around. Olivia doesn't say a word, her hand hovers above her own gun on her hip, though, while she watches the stranger's next moves. Peter is still lying on the ground, as well as the two medics, observing her, too.

Slowly the blue energy seems to fade away. "Fuck", the woman whispers after seeing the defibrillator on the ground and the two medics on her left and right. She looks herself up and down, and huffs as she takes in her bare torso. "You shouldn't have used that", she then points out, nodding towards the machine on the ground, and holsters the pistol. Upon seeing her shredded top down on the floor, she simply puts the Kevlar back on to hide her bare skin.

"Your heart stopped, so it was kinda needed", Peter responds smug without hesitation, drawing another chuckle from the woman.

"Once again dead. I wonder how often I can pull that shit before it gets old", she mumbles and shakes her head, staggering backwards and slouching down to the ground in front of her scattered armor, rummaging in them for something.

"Looking for these?", Olivia asks, holding the ball chain up.

The commander furrows her brow as she raises back up and, with long steps, strides forward, until close enough to yank the tags out of the agent's grasp and put it back around her neck.

"So, you're Commander Shepard?", the agent asks.

"Obviously", she answers and then looks Olivia up and down, before doing the same with Peter, who by now raised back to his feet. "And you are?"

"Agent Olivia Dunham, FBI", Olivia introduces herself, then points to her boyfriend. "This is Peter Bishop."

To their surprise, all Shepard does is laugh. "Good one, who are you really?"

"FBI."

The laughing dies out as the commander hears the seriousness in the agent's voice. Her brow furrows again and she tilts her head with a slight huff, but doesn't say anything about it anymore. She turns to the ceiling instead. "EDI?"

Olivia and Peter look at each other in confusion before turning their eyes back to the soldier who now passes by them and walks towards cockpit. That's when she notices the two soldiers on the ground, covered with yellow plastic blankets.

"Fuck", she breaths, kneels down in front of them and pulls the covers back far enough to get a look of their faces. She shakes her head as she recognizes one of her servicemen and Ensign Copeland. After pulling the cover back and standing up, she steps into the cockpit where Joker lies on a blanket on the ground. She feels his pulse and sighs in relief, as she feels the small thumps against her fingers.

Peter and Olivia watch from afar as the soldier walks past the bearded man on the ground and to the weird silver colored woman. "EDI?", she asks again and takes the head in her hands, sighing when she doesn't get an answer.

"Her skins been already cold when we got here", Olivia explains, causing the soldier to chuckle again.

"Of course, her _skin_ is always cold", Shepard remarks with air quotes. "This is a robot, after all."

"Okay, just what exactly happened here?", Peter inquires seemingly out of the blue.

"Hell, if I know", Shepard shrugs, staggering back to where she came from, with Olivia and Peter on her heels. "I lost consciousness like ten minutes after boarding." She turns around as she stands in front of the wall she was found before, giving the two another once over. "But since you're on my ship I guess we crashed somewhere?"

"Boston", Olivia nods.

The soldier turns back to the wall which, as it turns out, isn't a wall at all. With bare hands she pulls the doors of the elevator apart and steps into the cabin. "Damn, the core must be offline", she grumbles, kneels down and rips a grid out of the ground.

"What are you doing?"

"I'm going to restart the energy, hopefully", she explains as she climbs into the new hole and down a ladder on the side of the elevator shaft.

Olivia looks to Peter for a moment, before she climbs after her, a small flashlight clasped between her teeth so that she can see something.

A few meters later the soldier stops before a set of doors. The painting on the wall reads _Deck 4 Engineering_. Shepard's left arm suddenly begins to glow again and she pulls a weird ball of energy at the metal, which, upon being hit, bends slightly so that the two of them easily fit through it.

"How'd you do that?", Olivia asks bewildered as she stands outside of the shaft in a dark hallway and looks at the twisted metal.

"Warp", Shepard breaths as answer, sounding very exhausted. "And I hope I don't have to do that again, the nova earlier took too much."

Although that doesn't really answer her question in Olivia's opinion, she silently follows the Commander through two doors. Suddenly the woman rushes forward. "Tali!"

On the ground lies an obviously female figure in a full body suit, but the legs are bend strangely and she has only three toes and fingers on each foot and hand.

The Commander crouches down in front of her and shakes her shoulders. "Come on, Tali, wake up."

Olivia can hear a voice answering, but she doesn't understand the language, it's unlike anything she ever heard before. The soldier seems to understand it though, because she begins to grin and hug the woman on the floor.

"Do you know what happened?", Shepard asks her and judging by her heavy sigh, the strange woman in the suit doesn't know anything either. "Well, we need to get the core back online, I'm sure EDI has some data."


	15. Mass Effect X Fringe - II

**Spoiler  
** Mass Effect 3  
Fringe Season 1-4

 **Rating  
** T

 **Disclaimer  
** All rights of Mass Effect including the characters belong to BioWare and Electronic Arts. All right of Fringe including the characters belong to Warner Bros. Television and Bad Robot Productions. This product is a one-hundred percent non-profitably project.

 _ **A/N  
** The other version of the second chapter of my Mass Effect X Fringe Crossover; this time with Shepard's POV. I'm not sure if I'll ever actually write this fanfic or leave it at that._

* * *

 **Mass Effect X Fringe  
Working Title: So much for Retirement**

After four years of being an essential part of the Fringe Division, a section of the Federal Bureau of Investigation assigned to investigate the strange cases of fringe science, Olivia has seen a lot of weird stuff.

Even though she'd never tell her niece Ella or her future daughter about it, she's very well aware that there are indeed monsters, literally and figuratively, doing horrendous things.

She knows things like time travel, parallel universes, teleportation, and all the stuff that is in a vanilla science-fiction movie aren't just fiction or even mere theory, but all very much possible and existent. She's a weird combination of typical science-fiction abilities herself, after all.

It really wouldn't surprise her if one day they'd find out that not just another universe and some crazy scientists tinker with their world, but that aliens are experimenting on humans around the globe to find out or create the strangest things also. Walter even theorizes that aliens once messed with humanity and erased telepathic abilities.

And still, what she's seen on one seemingly harmless day is giving her the creeps for so many different reasons. And staring into red glowing eyes, belonging to a muscular, but heavily bruised female body, naked from the waist up, engulfed in a blue glow, so powerful and full of energy like nothing she's ever seen before, isn't even the weirdest, though maybe the creepiest one.

* * *

There's not much Shepard's senses pick up right now. She can hear voices, very far away and not familiar, but in a clear English, which means they're not quarians, since their translations are always slightly accented and accompanied by a slight alteration due to the environmental suits.

They can't be drell, turians or hanar either; she can't pick up any dual voices or secondary noises. For elcor they talk to fast, but for salarians not nearly fast enough. A volus would have to make more pauses because of its suit. And batarians and krogan have way deeper and rougher pitches than these.

That leaves only two options; either those voices belong to asari, or humans. Or both. Shepard guesses that they're humans, though, since most asari have naturally softer voices and one of them sounds quite like a male.

The only other thing Shepard can sense is pain. And a whole lot of that. Her arms feel like they're burning, and her head as if it's in the process of being cracked open. She hasn't felt pain like this since the day the factory in Vancouver exploded with her inside of it.

She tries to move, but her muscles won't obey. Then she tries to open her eyes at least and assess what her surroundings are, but she can't. The only muscles she can control, more or less deliberately, are her inner organs. But even that only adds to the searing pain.

Every breath feels as if she's getting air punched out of her lungs, every heartbeat ripples with brutal force through her entire bloodstream.

But suddenly everything changes as she feels something touch the skin on her neck, directly on her carotid, as if someone wants to feel her pulse. Her muscles move, her senses work. Her instincts of fighting and surviving kick in.

She dashes her right arm up and grips hard onto whatever is latched on her neck. Instantly she can hear a sharp hiss laced with pain from somebody close to her and her eyes snap open.

What she sees now could definitely be worse. In front of her kneels a woman in her early thirties, clad in a black slack suit with a pale blue blouse. She has smooth skin and long blond hair pulled back into a neat pony tail. Her eyes are a dark green with brown streaks in them. She has a somewhat shocked and pained look on her face, and only then Shepard realizes that she has her hand has firmly gripped around the woman's wrist, tightened enough to maybe even crush her bones.

Slowly she weakens her hold slightly, but doesn't completely let go, as her mind races, trying to come up with an explanation for what's going on right now.

The last thing she remembers is standing in front of the galaxy map, gazing at all the star systems threatened by the invasion of the reapers. She remembers how Joker screamed one curse after the other, and how the ship shook. She remembers falling, but after that there's only darkness.

"Calm down", the blonde tells Shepard with a soothing voice, her fingers are still on the artery, feeling every thump of the spectre's pulse. Then she turns away and talks to someone Shepard can't see. "Here's a conscious one."

Seconds later another human enters her field of view, a man, probably in his thirties as well. He has dark brown hair, cut short, and a stubbly beard. His blue eyes seem kind, but they're dark beneath a deep frown.

Suddenly pictures of scenes from long ago enter her memory. Pictures of a young boy, around ten, running into the cornfield, with Shepard as a girl directly behind him. He has the same shade of brown hair, the same shade of blue eyes, and the way they look at her when he turns around, waiting for Shepard to catch up, is so very much like this man's eyes.

"John", Shepard breaths, her voice sounding scratchy and weak, and the single word burns in her throat, because of the physical pain speaking causes as well as the emotions which rile up her body at the memory of her brother lying in her arms with thirteen, his blue eyes dead.

She wants to reach out to him, touch his cheek, feel his skin under her fingers. But as she moves her hand from the wrist of the woman, her arm just goes slack and drops to her side, her eyes close and her head hangs down. It is as if her body just shut down.

"Shit", she hears the woman curse and feels her fingers still at the neck. "We need an AED", she shouts.

Instantly Shepard wants to protest, wants to scream at her that that's a damned stupid idea, not just because she's clearly alive, but also because of all the cybernetic in her body, but she can't move, can't speak. Now she notices that the dull throbbing of her heartbeat has vanished, as well as the sharp pain at every breath. Mostly because she isn't breathing.

Panic rises up in her own brain when she feels how she's lied down to the floor and hands are fumbling around her torso to get rid of the chestplate. It's yanked off and thrown away, emitting a loud clang when it hits the ground.

"Damnit", the woman exclaims. "How do we get fast through Kevlar?"

"By finding the zipper", she can hear the man speak for the first time.

Rough hands pull the rest of her armor on her torso off, then her upper body is lifted up and the last piece of her upper hardsuit is yanked off her back.

"Got it", the man says as he first rips the fastener apart before pulling the zipper all the way down along her spine. After lying her back down, they tore her compression shirt apart as well, the last garment covering her bare torso aside from the sports bra.

They take the ball chain from her neck as well and then strong hands are pushing down on her ribcage repeatedly. It doesn't really hurt, right now, nothing hurts, it's just a dull feeling.

"Commander Sara J. Shepard", the woman says, the clinging of Shepard's dog tags audible. "She's a soldier."

"They probably all are", the man grunts right before bending over her head and breathing air into her lungs.

A new set of footsteps comes closer quickly, accompanied by another voice barking for the man to move aside. The heart massage stops for not even a second, before other hands continue it.

She hears how the AED is being charged before the second man shouts. "Clear!" The massage stops again, and cold electrodes are pushed down on her torso. Then her world erupts into flames.

Her body jerks, every muscle in her body aches for a millisecond and then goes hot. The cybernetics overclock and cause her brain to overload as well. She can't help it, she has to get rid of the energy if she doesn't want to have the feeling of her brain being cooked in her skull.

She releases a loud scream, her eyes open wide, and like on the Citadel she knows exactly that they have to be glowing right now. Then her body releases a nova of pure biotic energy, ripping through the air and fling everything in its path away.

Heavily breathing Shepard gets to her feet and looks around. There are two humans clad in blue and yellow with silver reflectors and a staff of Aesculapius embedded in the clothing. They are leaning against the hull of the Normandy to her left and right, pain written all over their faces.

The man who reminds her of John is lying next to one of the consoles on the left side of the Combat Information Center. Slowly he's lifting himself up on his elbows to look at her.

The blonde who felt her pulse, or lack of it, clutches the railing in front of the galaxy map tightly. Or better said, where the galaxy map should be, but there's no hologram visible right now. She was obviously catapulted up the short steps and flung into the metal.

The CIC's lights are all turned off, as well as the consoles and every other bit of technology. Only two flashlights scattered on the ground and the soft glow of her own biotics are illuminating the darkness.

"Fuck", Shepard huffs, feeling how her cybernetics slowly cool down again. She looks herself up and down, takes in the fading red crisscross on her bare skin, before she pulls the top part of her Kevlar overall up and puts it on. The arms of the garment are torn, but at least the bulk of it is still intact, so that it covers her upper body effectively. "Are you crazy to just use that thing?", she nods towards the defibrillator lying on the ground next to where she's standing.

"Your heart stopped", the man with the stubbly beard responds with a smug voice. "It was kinda needed."

This startles her for a second. She did notice that her breathing stopped, but if her heart really stopped beating, how was it possible for her to be fully aware of all that happened? She then recalls the few times she woke up in the Cerberus lab although she shouldn't have been able to gain consciousness yet back then. "Only mostly dead once more", she remarks dryly. "I wonder how often I can pull that shit before it gets old."

"What just happened here?", the blonde inquires and rubs her back as she steps back down from the small platform. Her voice falters a bit, she's obviously trying, and failing, to keep up her brave act.

"You supercharged my cybernetics", Shepard scoffs accusingly with a roll of her back to emerald eyes. With the amount of cybernetics she has in her body, especially latched to vital organs, high electric doses have a similar effect as being injected with pure adrenaline. As she notices how the energy levels within her body stabilizes themselves again, she lets the biotic power around her die out. "Next time scan the fucking body before pulling that kind of shit." She then just outstretches her arm to the blonde and moves her fingers in a curl. "My tags, please" she more demands than asks, despite the use of the word _please_.

Without a word the woman hands over the ball chain, on which two dog-tags and a ring are dangling. Shepard inspects them shortly. They're all still intact, and as she sees the ring a small smile creeps up her face, only for the fraction of a second, though. She puts the chain back around the neck and holds onto the ring for a moment before letting it dangle freely from her neck.

"So, you're Commander Shepard?", the blonde asks her. It doesn't sound like she's used to, when somebody asks her that question. It's neither awestruck, nor accusing. It's just a simple inquiry, to check if she got the name right.

"Obviously", Shepard nods, then inspects the woman closer. She doesn't wear a uniform, but her posture is confident and has a hint of military stride in it. She touches her tags again and tilts her head slightly. "You a comrade?"

"I was a gunny, but that's long ago."

Without hesitation Shepard straightens her stance and clasps her hands behind her back, emitting natural authority. "Semper fi."

"Ooh rah", she answers, the hint of a smile at the corner of her mouth.

"So, marine", she addresses the woman with the term because there isn't something like an ex-marine. "Who are you today?"

"Agent Olivia Dunham", she responds and reaches for a pocket in the inside of her blazer, taking a small wallet out, opening it and holding it up, the inner ID directed at the spectre. "FBI."

Shepard looks at the ID, and then chuckles. "Man, you almost got me. Who are you really with?"

Olivia frowns and turns to the man for a moment, who stood up by now and stepped closer to the two women. "FBI", she repeats with strong seriousness, causing Shepard to pause for a moment.

As far as she knows the FBI was closed down and replaced by the planet-wide Terran Bureau of Investigation shortly after the establishment of the Systems Alliance. "I see", she mumbles, not sure what else there is to say, instead she turns to the ceiling. "EDI?" There's no answer from the AI, which doesn't really surprise her since nothing seems to be online right now. She just hopes that her core hasn't been damaged.

She turns around and faces the elevator. Of course there's no holographic interface to trigger the elevator and she can't use her omni-tool either since that has been destroyed with parts of her armor during the battle in London and her spare one is up in her cabin. So she grabs the doors of the elevator and, with pure strength enhanced by biotics, shoves them open.

"Okay, what exactly is going on here?", Olivia asks after seeing the spectre glowing blue once more.

"Hell if I know", she answers while stepping into the small room and prying one of the grids on the ground off. "I've lost consciousness like ten minutes after boarding." She throws the grid to the side and looks up to the agent. "But since you're on my ship I guess we crashed somewhere?"

"Boston", Olivia nods, then shakes her head. "But that's not what I meant."

Shepard doesn't even acknowledge the sentence, she's rather wondering how they landed back on earth. She clearly remembers how they initiated the relay jump. But it's probably better than getting caught in the orbit of a gas giant.

"Why are you glowing?", the agent inquires as she realizes that the soldier won't react to her statement.

"What, you've never seen a biotic before?" When Olivia just stares at her in confusion, Shepard chuckles slightly. "Damn, you definitely didn't get around much. Not that I blame you, the galaxy is in a shit place right now", she mutters darkly. "How's the war going anyway?"

"What war?", Olivia furrows her brow in confusion, but Shepard misreads the remake as a sarcastic comment.

"Yeah, I know, it's more like a slaughter", she sighs and climbs into the hole on the ground of the elevator and onto the ladder embedded into the shaft's wall.

"Hey, where are you going?", the blonde leans down and looks into the darkness of the shaft from above. She pulls her flashlight out and points it down, illuminating the shaft slightly.

"I'm going to restart the energy. Hopefully anyway", Shepard sighs slightly. She isn't really that versed with the ship's technology, she's got her group of engineers for that, after all. "Feel free to join me."

After a moment of contemplation Olivia climbs down the ladder as well. "So, what is this thing? Some sort of secret government project?"

Shepard stops on the ladder as she reaches deck four and turns towards the closed elevator doors. She hates that she has to demolish her own ship, but from her position on the ladder there's no other way to open the doors without a control than to throw her biotics at it. Carefully she concentrates a small amount of the dark energy in her hand and warps the doors open. "What?"

"This airplane", Olivia clarifies as she climbs behind the soldier on the floor of deck four.

"The Normandy is a frigate. And hardly a secret one", Shepard says nonchalantly, then stops dead in her track and turns around to face the agent. She narrows her eyes; she's never heard anybody call a starship airplane before. Actually, she never heard the term outside of history class point black. "You do know what a starship is, right?"

"Well, of course, and I know that they don't look like this."

Shepard just stands there and looks her up and down. This woman claims she's with the FBI, an organization not existent anymore since more than thirty-five years. She has never seen a biotic before, maybe doesn't even know what a biotic is. She calls the Normandy an airplane, a term and technology pretty much outdated since the discovery of mass effect physics in 2148. And last but not least spaceships look very much like this. The Normandy may be slightly different in design than other Alliance vessels due to the influence of the turians, but the concept remains the same.

Something isn't right here, but the agent doesn't seem to be trying to fool her. She speaks the truth, or whatever she believes the truth is. It reminds her a little bit of the people who were influenced by the leviathan, but with a far larger throwback. "Let's talk about that after we turn the power back on", she then says, turns around and walks through the door to the actual engineering part of the deck.

The first thing she sees in the dark is a figure slouched against a wall. When Olivia's flashlight flickers across it, she recognizes the person instantly. "Tali!", she shouts and dashes forward. She flops down on her knees in front of the quarrion and takes her head, or better said helmet, into her hands, lifting it up. She's trying to look through the visor, but can't see the woman's features underneath it, and without an omni-tool available she has no idea how to check for vital signs. And she has the feeling that asking the agent for her omni-tool will only raise more questions.

"Come on Tali, wake up", she begs her while she shakes the shoulders slightly. After a short while she hears a weak cough and feels a shudder ripping through the body in her arms.

"Shepard?", the quarian asks her weakly, followed by another cough.

Smiling brightly at the signs of life, Shepard releases a relieved breath and hugs Tali tightly, too tightly if her noises are any indicator. "Thank god." She releases her after a few seconds and happily stares into the glowing eyes behind the mask. "Are you alright?"

"I guess", the quarian mumbles and activates her omni-tool to check her environmental suit after being helped up by Shepard. There seem to be no breaches or leaks. "What happened?"

"I have no idea", the commander admits with a heavy sigh. "I hoped with the power back on we could find out. I'm sure EDI has a ton of information about that."

"Probably. She loves to poke her nose into everything."

"Well, she likes planning for her rebellion", Shepard offers, having more than once heard that particular joke from EDI. At least she's hoping that it's still just a joke.

"Don't even joke about that", quarian says with a shudder and turns to her console. Or where her console would be, if the power was on.

While Tali tinkers with her omni-tool, the agent steps next to the commander and watches her confused. "You understand her?", she whispers to Shepard, who isn't even surprised anymore by that question and simply nods.

"I think we've got a lot of catching up to do", Shepard mumbles more to herself than anybody else, but Olivia hears her anyway and agrees with a nod herself.

"Okay", Tali begins after a few minutes of scrolling through her omni and rushing back and forth in the rooms. "I think I can turn the grid back online, but I can't promise that everything will function."

"Do it."

The dead silence instantly vanishes as Tali activates a command on her omni-tool and is replaced by the soft wuh-wuh-wuh of the engine core. The lights turn on a second later, as well as the consoles.

"You are awesome", Shepard smiles at the quarian.

"I know. Let's go activate EDI", she answers and begins to lead the way back to the elevator, only now realizing that Shepard isn't the only human in front of her. "Who's that?"

"It's a long story I don't even know about right now", Shepard explains and ushers the quarian forward. "A story I'm sure we'll discuss later."

"Keelah", is all Tali says upon seeing the damaged elevator doors and shakes her head disapprovingly.

"What? I needed to get them open."

"And overloading the sensors wouldn't have worked?", Tali scoffs and calls the elevator down to the floor.

"I lost my omni-tool in London, along with half my armor and my shotgun."

"You lost your shotgun?", Tali turns her head to the spectre who can see the glowing eyes widen in shock. The quarian reaches out with her right hand and lies it on her shoulder, squeezing it slightly. "I'm so sorry about that."

The sincerity in her statement makes Shepard chuckle, knowing that Tali would be devastated if she'd ever happen to lose her own shotgun. Garrus on the other hand would probably be relieved.

"God, I hate this thing", Shepard grumbles as the elevator moves up, even slower than usually. "You'd think Cerberus would've upgraded this lame as fuck turian technology."

"They have great ships, but they should be forbidden from even touching elevators", the quarian agrees with a short nod.

A few seconds later they step out of the tiny room one deck above, the memorial wall in plain view. A sharp pain stabs through Shepard's heart at the reminder that they'll have to add their Captain's name to the list of soldiers who died serving on the Normandy. But she puts the thought away for now, turns left, and walks towards the medical bay.

The motion sensors seem to work since the energy is back online, because the doors automatically slip aside as soon as the commander comes closer, but before she can enter the room, a voice from her left lets her stop in her tracks.

She smiles at the sight of Liara standing in front of her own room, still clad in Shepard's jacket. "What happened?", she asks concerned as she steps closer to the group of three. Then the asari turns her head slightly and frowns. "Who're you? And why are you staring at me like that?"

Shepard turns to Olivia who, upon seeing an asari for the very first time, gazes at the blue woman with wide eyes, the mouth opened slightly.

"Don't bother, she can't understand you anyway", the commander explains shortly. Then she steps closer to the asari, lowers her voice and tries to speak to her with the broken Armali she can muster. "Do you have any information about human history?"

"Maybe, why?"


	16. Mass Effect X The 100 - I

**Spoiler  
** The 1OO Season 1-3  
Mass Effect 2

 **Rating  
** T

 **Disclaimer  
** All rights of The 100 including the characters belong to Alloy Entertainment, Warner Bros. and Jason Rothenberg. This product is a one-hundred percent non-profitably project. All rights of Mass Effect including the characters belong to BioWare and Electronic Arts.

 _ **A/N  
** I've had an idea for a Mass Effect / The 100 crossover a couple of days ago and just began to write what the first meeting between Clarke and Shepard might look like. Although I like the meeting very much, I threw it all over because I can't really figure out a good storyline with this crossover. Meh, maybe one day I get an idea._

* * *

 **Mass Effect X The 100  
** **Working Title: The Second Sky People**

The strong hands on her shoulders won't budge as she's dragged into a big tent in the middle of a small camp site, holding barely more than half a dozen men and women. She could probably try and fight her way out, even though she doesn't have her weapons. But she'd rather not risk anything until she knows what exactly is going on here.

The people she's seen thus far all looked pretty much the same and nothing like what she's used to. There are giant men and muscled women, all wearing clothes made of leather and fur. Some wear masks, some show tattoos on their bare skin. They all have braided hair, making their faces clearly visible. They're all armed as well, but she hasn't seen a single gun yet, only swords, axes, daggers and bows. It is as if she was thrown back into the Dark Ages or Viking Era.

The person Shepard's standing in front of now, is different though. She can tell that much easily although she's turned with the back towards her. She's smaller than any of the others, smaller than Shepard, too, as a matter of fact, her form lithe. Her hair, a mixture of different shades of red - clearly not the natural color - is both, braided and falling limply down over her shoulders.

She wears a deep black leather jacket, way more modern than the rough leather of the other people, but ripped and patched all over, with a slightly torn hood hanging down her back. Her trousers look like dark jeans with various patches as well.

She's as well armed as the rest of the camp, a sword strapped to her back, a hunting knife on the side of her left shank. Shepard already guesses that she sports more knives and daggers on the front of her body somewhere. The thing that hits her most though, is the black pistol holstered on the left hipbone. _Not the Dark Ages after all_ , Shepard thinks quietly for herself.

When the woman realizes that she's not alone anymore, she turns her head slightly to the entrance, enough for her to peak through her wild streaks of hair, but not enough for Shepard to see anything of her face.

"Haukom oso gada honon in? ( _Why do we have a prisoner_ )", the woman says then. Her voice is rough, slightly hoarse, but smooth at the same time. Her tone lacks emotion, instead seems very calculated, and sounds very much like a question.

"Yu don tel osir nou frag Skaikru op ( _You told us not to kill Sky People_ )", one of the men who hold me in a firm grip answers her, he seems slightly submissive and respectful towards her.

"Ai don nou tel yu hon eni kom emo daun, Maikel ( _I didn't tell you to capture any of them, Michael_ )", the woman continues with a slight shake of her head and barely audible sigh, before she turns her face away again, not letting Shepard catch even a glimpse of it. "En em nou kom oma kru. ( _And she's not of my people_ )", she continues dismissively.

"Ba em slip daun kom skai ( _But she fell from the sky_ )", the man argues and flings an arm in Shepard direction before he takes a step forward and points at the woman, although more reserved than the gesture before. "Bilaik yu. ( _Like you_ )"

Whatever the man said, has a visible effect on the redhead. She tenses for a short moment, before her muscles relax again, and turns her head around. This time Shepard can see the face fully.

The red streaks of hair, braided and not braided, frame a round and pale face with a dimple chin and piercing blue eyes. Some old scars and relatively fresh wounds cover her otherwise smooth skin. A thick black stripe is painted on her face, covering a line from the middle of her forehead over her right eye down to the edge of the right cheek.

She's young, Shepard realizes, very young. Probably not even twenty. Way too young to lead a camp full of apparent warriors, yet the older men and women seem to follow her.

"Taim? ( _When_ )", she asks the warrior, the former bland voice finally laced with a hint of something; curiosity.

"Yeson ( _Yesterday_ )", the warrior responds, whereat the woman mumbles something, but Shepard can't pick up the words. She turns around completely and reveals what Shepard already assumed; more weapons. A dagger is sheathed and clamped on a thick belt, and three small knives hang in small loops on the inside of the opened jacket. Under the jacket she wears a simple black shirt, slightly torn at the bottom.

For the first time since entering the tent, the woman actually takes a good look at Shepard. At her dark long hair, tied back into a messy ponytail, which used to be neat until the warriors caught her off-guard. At the dark skin, covered in few scars as well. At the emerald eyes. But mostly at the armor.

The black ceramic plates are covered with scratches and dirt. Paint splintered off in various placed, the N7 symbol is barely visible on her chest, but the red and white stripe on her right arm stands out.

Then the woman's eyes move to the gag and down to the bound wrists.

"Gon we ( _Leave_ )", the redhead than says in a tone that clearly indicates an order, her eyes still locked on Shepard.

"Wanheda?", the warrior questions her, a look of slight confusion on his face, but he is shushed quickly as the woman looks up to him. He nods his head and takes a step back. "Sha, Wanheda ( _Yes, Wanheda_ )", he nods again before turning around and leaving the tent, together with the second man who hasn't said a word in the whole encounter.

Now Shepard stands alone in front of the young woman who's still eying her interested. She then moves forward and reaches out with gloved hands to remove the gag. She doesn't do anything else though, she simply takes a step back again and watches the soldier.

Not really one for the thick silence, Shepard decides to say something, anything, really. "Wanheda?", she asks the woman, whose eyes snap back to Shepard's green ones in an instant. "Is that your name?", she asks her, not that she really expects her to understand a word she says. Until now none of the men or women she tried to communicate with responded to her English in any way.

The redhead furrows her brow as she keeps gazing into the eyes and tilts her head slightly. Shepard already wants to accept the fact that she's not understanding her, when the woman answers in the same bland voice as before. "No."

"So you _do_ understand me", Shepard determines in a wary tone and now questions herself inwardly if the other people understood her all the time as well. If they did, they're very good at hiding it, she has to give them that.

"I do", the woman answers with a slight nod. "I apologize for the way you were brought here", she then continues, her voice still lacking any kind of sincere emotion regardless of the words. "Michael is a good guy, but he can be harsh at times."

"I've had it worse", Shepard replies without hesitation, shrugging her shoulders. She already died once, after all. It is more the humiliation of being captured at all, what pains her. "Where exactly am I?", she asks the apparent leader of her captors.

"Far north-west of Polis, near Azgeda's border", she explains, the names not ringing a bell at all with Shepard. "That's as exact as I'm able to say myself." The blue eyes then go back to examining the soldier whose wrists are still bound together. "But I guess that doesn't give you any clue anyway."

"You could say that", Shepard agrees with the redhead's spot-on observation.

"Who are you?", the redhead asks her after a short pause, the voice thick with curiosity.

"Commander Shepard of the Alliance Navy", she answers with her usual phrase. "And you?"

* * *

"Clarke", she answers after a moment, not revealing any more information about her rank in this small society she built herself, or better said which somehow built itself around her, nor her clan, if the Sky People could even be considered as such.

She eyes the woman in front of her again, the woman who, according to Michael, fell out of the sky like the Arkers did more than a year ago, only that she apparently arrived a bit late.

She seems to be a kind of warrior or soldier herself, though. Scars litter her skin, and the armor is a dead giveaway, too, although she's never seen anything like that before.

Soldiers from the ark only have uniforms and bulletproof vests, some of them helmets. The grounder's warriors are clad in leather and fur, or pieces of chainmail. But this armor looks more like the modern version of a knight's armor.

What makes her curious most though, is that this woman doesn't have a clue who Wanheda is. The name was given to Clarke shortly after she wiped out the mountain men, and although not everyone knows who exactly Wanheda is or what she looks like, they all know the story. They all heard of the Commander of Death.

Clarke hated that word when she first heard it from Michael, and she still hates it, but she learned to wear it like an armor. It keeps the people she doesn't want to deal with away, and the people close to her, as close as anybody is to her these days anyway, faithful.

"Michael said, you fell from the sky?"

"Yeah, my ship crashed in a near forest", the woman who calls herself Shepard shrugs nonchalantly. "It probably sounds crazy to you."

"It does", Clarke answers with a short nod. "But I guess for different reasons than you think."

"What do you mean?"

"I came from the sky myself", she explains and takes in the confused look on the face of the woman in front of her for a moment before continuing. "Over a year ago my people sent a hundred people down to earth to check if-"

"Wait a second", Shepard interrupts the tale of how Clarke ended up on the planet with wide eyes. "We're on _earth_?"

"Of course", Clarke answers, slightly taken aback. "Where else would we be?"

"No", Shepard whispers and shakes her head frantically from side to side while taking a step back. "That can't be."


	17. Mass Effect X The 100 - II

**Spoiler**  
The 1OO S2  
Mass Effect 1-3  
The Second Sky People - Fall

 **Rating  
** T

 **Disclaimer  
** All rights of The 100 including the characters belong to Alloy Entertainment, Warner Bros. and Jason Rothenberg. This product is a one-hundred percent non-profitably project. All rights of Mass Effect including the characters belong to BioWare and Electronic Arts.

 _ **A/N  
**_ _This piece is an idea I have for the very last chapter of my story Fall. So absolutely do not read if you don't want to be spoiled!_

* * *

 **Mass Effect X The 1OO  
** **Working Title: Fall**

„You've been gone long", Shepard says as she hears footsteps on the ground, breaking the fragile ice atop of the grass from the last night.

"I have", is the only answer Clarke provides her as she nears the spectre and puts the small box of food and supplies down next to the bonfire.

It doesn't really take more than one look at the blonde girl for Shepard to figure out why she didn't return before nightfall from her visit at Nylah's small tradehouse. But she doesn't comment on it, everyone has needs, after all, and traveling for nearly three months out in the wilderness with only one companion, a cynical one from another timeline at that, isn't really the way a human should live.

Instead Shepard searches the box and finds enough food for both of them to last another week. "You definitely are a better hunter than me", she comments, and means it.

"That's probably because when you fight, there's nothing left to eat", Clarke deadpans as she grabs for a handful meat, spears it with a stick, and holds it into the crackling fire between them.

The spectre just smiles. That is indeed true, her fighting technique isn't really the silent one and its goal is to destroy as many enemies as possible within a short span of time. Its efficient, of course, but not really useful for hunting.

Besides she doesn't know shit about shooting a bow, and the force of her Carnifex, let alone the Eviscerator, would simply make too much of a mess on their own.

"There were men out there, searching us", she suddenly interrupts the silence out of the blue, causing Shepard, who was about to fall asleep yet again, to open her eyes, eying her warily and urging her to continue with a curt nod. "I couldn't really see their faces, didn't want them to get a good look at mine, but my best bet is they're Azgeda. And the one was truly a giant."

"A giant?"

Clarke nods, looking up from the fire and into the green eyes of the Normandy's commanding officer. "He was taller than any person I've ever seen. His shoulders were wide and his back broad. And his voice was as deep as a mountain tall. Trigedasleng was clearly not his mother tongue, though."

Shepard squints her eyes and tilts her head. "There aren't many around who didn't grow up with Trigedasleng. And they're all your people."

"Or yours", Clarke adds and Shepard instantly averts her eyes.

"I doubt it", she mumbles. After everything she learned by now, it's pretty certain that the others aren't alive anymore. The fight against the reapers ended ninety-seven years ago, almost a century. That would make most of her crew around one-hundred-and-thirty years old.

Not impossible in a time when medicine had the standards of the past century, but ever since the reapers everything changed, and the human life span on earth was drastically reduced. Even if the people wouldn't die in the countless wars, they'd die because they simply don't have the medical expertise anymore.

There are only two persons who still could be alive, by their age. Well, maybe three; turians have a similar life-span to humans after all, but are way more robust and hence don't have the need for as much medical treatment after hitting the hundreds like humans did. But the one big problem for her best friend would be that he can't eat anything from this planet because of his different genetic makeup.

So she has all the hopes on the last two of her crew, being the teenage krogan, and her asari lover. They both can easily hit hundreds of years, even without medicine, and especially krogan are robust as fuck. He probably laughed at the knowledge of the radioactivity in the air, while Liara freaked out.

"You rarely talked about them", Clarke observes after a while of Shepard zoning out, while munching on a panther steak.

"I don't see the need, they're all dead, after all", Shepard sighs, trying not to think about the ever active hope in her head that Liara and Grunt are somewhere out there, and Clarke wouldn't come up with that idea anyway, since she doesn't even know about the krogans and asari.

"But they're your family, aren't they?"

The commander looks into her eyes for a moment before dropping her gaze back to the fire. She recalls having briefly talked to her about her crew, and she also recalls having called them her family. And it is true, in a certain manner, isn't it? They were as close to a family as she ever had.

"You said your girlfriend was on board, and your son", Clarke continues, causing Shepard to smile. "One of your brothers, and also your parents." Yes, she actually called them all that. "How were they?"

 _Maybe it'll help talking about them_ , Shepard thinks as she traces the burn scar on her left palm with the tip of her thumb. She's always built any kind of emotion up inside of her, until it exploded in the form of pure rage in a battle, but there haven't been lots of battles lately, and she doubts that there're more battles to come.

"Who do you want to know about first?", she finally asks, getting a smile from the younger woman.

"Your brother, I wonder if he's as badass as his sister."

"Oh, the old chicken", Shepard laughs loud out and shakes her head, grinning all the way. "We weren't related, you know. I _did_ have a brother, a real one, but he died when we were kids. Garrus though was a brother by heart. We fought together, joked together, drank together", she trails off as she thinks about the turian. He was with her from the very start, the only one to never hesitate when she asks him to follow her. He believed in her, and she in him. "He was the first to see me as a real person in a very long time."

"What do you mean by that?"

Shepard hesitates, digging further into the rough patches of her scar tissue with the thumb. "Before I took command of the Normandy I was considered… I guess cold-hearted is the right word. But Garrus saw me, the _real_ me, behind all the shields and walls I put up, and urged me to tear them all down."

"Then… did you meet your girlfriend before or after he got through to your heart?"

"I met her before, but only shortly. And we weren't together for months after. It's been all very… complicated", _with her having been our enemy's daughter, and then becoming the greatest information broker in the whole galaxy_ , Shepard ends the short description of their relationship in her head.

"Was she a soldier like you?"

"No. I mean… She _could_ fight. And if you cornered her she could be the most terrifying enemy you ever fought, but she was a scientist at heart", the commander explains the natural biotic who became the most important person in her life in the short span of few months. "She was more dangerous because of her knowledge, though. She had control over a network that had information on everyone and everything. There was nothing she didn't knew."

"Must've been hard keeping secrets from her, then."

"Oh, you have no idea", she genuinely laughs, recalling one time that she went partying on the Citadel at the Purgatory, and ended up completely drunk on Aria's couch. Of course Liara didn't need long to figure it out, and the speech she got from her was all but pleasant.

"What about your son then? I mean, he must've been pretty young, how did he end up on a warship?"

"In the end Grunt was… barely two", Shepard begins, thinking about how to tell the blonde about the biggest krogan she's ever seen and his relationship to her. "Though technically he's been more a teenager."

"I don't think I understand", Clarkes furrows her brow as she leans closer to the commander to better listen.

"He was tank-bred. A crazy scientist decided to create the ultimate specimen. He made him stronger and bigger and pumped his brain full of knowledge", Shepard twirls a dagger she drew out of the box between her fingers as she talks about the krogan. "When I freed him from the tank his body and mind were that of a teenage boy."

Clarke stares into the dancing flames for a while before she closes her eyes and takes a deep breath. "That reminds me of the mountain men."

Shepard doesn't comment on that. For her the mountain men seemed more like a mixture of Cerberus and the reapers. At least Okeer had a noble goal.

"So I guess you adopted him after finding him?"

"Not really… I needed a soldier", Shepard admits her real reason behind getting Grunt out of the tank in the first place. "And biologically he was the best fucking soldier ever created." She looks up from the knife in her hands, ready to face the accusing gaze of the blonde, only to find her nodding at her. "He chose me as his battlemaster, an important role in his culture. And somehow I became his mother as well."

Clarke just opens her mouth to speak, as an arrow strikes the dirt right next to her. She jumps off the log she's been sitting on, hand on the hilt of a sword, staring into the direction where it came from. Shepard jumped to the side as well, drawing her shotgun, and concentrating biotic energy in form of a barrier.

It doesn't take long for the first two men to charge at them from behind a tree, but they don't get far as Shepard dashes forward, shotgun raised into the air. Its butt connects with the temple of the first man when Shepard crashes into him and she instantly turns around to shoot at the second man. He flies back a few meters at the impact and neither of the two stand up again.

A few seconds later three more men charge at her, their swords and axes raised, and Shepard lets them come closer and closer until they're close enough to actually hit her, before she lets her barrier explode and all three of them get knocked back, thrown against trees with a force that will leave them with broken bones.

"Heh, heh, heh", she hears somebody laugh from deeper within the forest. It's a slow, deep laugh, and so very familiar. "I hoped it would be you when I heard your name", the grumbling voice tells her and Shepard can't help but smile when she sees the person slowly stalking closer to her.

"Grunt."


	18. The 100 - I

**Spoiler** Season 2 Episode 1-4, The 100: Destiny

 **Rating** T

 **Disclaimer** All rights of The 100 including the characters belong to Alloy Entertainment, Warner Bros. and Jason Rothenberg.

 **A/N** This part is set around chapter 12-15 in my story _Destiny_ (at this point not published yet), so DO NOT READ if you plan on reading it once I've put it online!

* * *

 **The 100  
Working Title: Destiny**

You slowly near the camp around the dropship with Anya's arm around your shoulders as you steady her. You've been walking through the woods for half a day, only stopping for minutes a few times and you can feel pure exhaustion fill your body. You can't even imagine how Anya must feel, she was already heavily weakened when you found her in Mount Weather, but now she can barely stand, even though she's supported by your own last strengths.

"Oso don du em ( _We did it_ )", you breathe, a wide, toothy smile plastered on your face as you laugh weakly and look over to Anya. The warrior can barely keep her eyes open, but you can see her smile as well, a rare sight you usually only see in sparring matches which makes you giggle even more.

That's when you hear a loud shot resonating from within the camp and suddenly Anya slumps next to you. "Onya!", you scream as you lie her down on the ground and frantically search for an open wound. You see the blood spill through the clothes in her right shoulder. "No, no, no", you repeat over and over again as you put pressure to the wound and search for her hazel eyes which flicker shut, then open repeatedly. "Ste kom ai ( _Stay with me_ )", you beg her, when you hear several feet approaching you.

"En's ait ( _It's okay_ )", she whispers, her voice weak. You _feel_ her speak more than you actually hear it and you feel water fill your eyes, your sight goes heavily blurry within seconds. "Ai gonplei ste odon. ( _My fight is over._ )"

"No", you shout at her, tears now spilling down your cheeks in frustrated, upset, and angry lines. "Yu gonplei nou ste joken odon! ( _Your fight is not fucking over!_ )"

"Grab her!", a man shouts from behind you and hands reach out for your shoulders and arms to drag you away from Anya. You try to resist, try to fight them off and get back down to your mentor, your friend, but they're too strong and you're too exhausted.

You shout at them, over and over again, to let you go, to save her life, but they're just dragging you to the side and then pressing you face first into the ground, and all you're able to do is cry as you see Anya looking at you, peaceful, too peaceful.

"What's going on here?", you then hear a new voice from behind, it's female and you know it, you recall it from your memory, from years ago when you were still on the Ark and from only days ago when you heard it on the radio.

"Please", you turn your head as much as you can and beg the woman who still has no idea who you really are, your voice heavily cracking. "Help her."

And indeed the woman crouches down next to her and inspects the wound, then the few clothes Anya's wearing and all the blood and dirt that's littering her skin. "They're not even armed and you just shoot?", she yells at one of the guards as she opens the jacket Anya wears completely and presses a cloth onto the wound. "Get her inside", she orders them, and when no one moves raises to her feet and shouts a loud "now!" that makes two of the men who are holding you down shuffle to Anya and lift her up carefully to carry her into the dropship, the woman directly behind them.

The last man who's with you jolts you back up to your feet, then shoves you towards the ship as well. Your steps are clumsy and you stumble the way more than you actually go it, with his left hand still firmly grabbing your shoulder, which you're actually thankful for because you don't think you'd be able to stand upright without this _support_ , and the barrel of his gun pressed into your back.

Once inside he shackles your hands with steel wire that rubs painfully on your skin, not that you really care for the pain. Your eyes instantly fall on Anya who's lying bare up from the waist, except for the bindings covering her breasts, on the floor, and the doctor tending the wound.

You crouch down to the floor a few meters away from them, lean against the bulkhead and watch them as the guard who dragged you inside stands next to you with his weapon still pointed at your head.

"Gon raun, Onya ( _Fight, Anya_ )", you whisper, the tears stopped spilling down your face but your voice still sounds wet and cracks every few syllables. Normally you wouldn't dare to let people see you in this state, but you don't even think about hiding your emotional pain right now. "Yu don nou ron of kom maun jos gon na wan op. ( _You didn't escape the mountain just to die._ )"

"Quiet", the guard orders and pushes the barrel of his gun into the side of your face. It stings for a moment, but it has his desired effect. Although you'd love to disarm him and shove him the gun up his ass - quite literally - you don't. You're too worn out and the last bit of common sense in your head tells you that it'd be a stupid idea to attack him with Anya on the brink of death. So you stay quiet as you keep watching the doctor work, until exhaustion finally catches up to you and you fall asleep.

You wake up again to the feeling of someone touching your cheek and your instincts kick in as you instantly shoot up with your bound hands to grab for the wrist. As you open the eyes you find yourself staring right into the face of the Ark's chief medical officer.

"It's okay", she assures you, and although there's a brief flicker of panic on her face due to your rapid reaction, she's calm and you almost find yourself crying again when you realize that this is the first time in seven years that your mother looked at you with her soft brown eyes and said those simple words. "I won't hurt you."

But she doesn't even know who you are, doesn't know that you're her daughter who fled the Ark seven years ago. You find yourself questioning if she even still believes that you could actually be alive. And even though she has absolutely no information about you and no reason to trust you, she helped you, she helped Anya.

 _Anya_.

Your eyes snap to the side, searching for her body. "She's alive", Abby tells you with a slight smile, reading in your reaction what you're thinking and looking for, before the smile falters with a sigh. "Barely."

"Thank you", you whisper and realize that you're still holding the wrist in your hands. Abby holds a wet cloth close to your face, she was probably trying to clean your skin and look for wounds on your body as well while you sleep. Your gaze flickers to the cloth and then up to Abby again. You slowly release your grip and let your hands sink back down into your lap again. But when Abby closes the distance between the cloth and your dirt covered skin, you shrink away.

The doctor just sighs again and leans back to let her gaze wander across your appearance. She takes it all in, the dirt, the blood, the few torn clothes, and especially the face. "You were the one who was with the hundred, weren't you?"

You raise your eyebrows in surprise. You didn't expect her to recognize you as the grounder who helped the hundred when they arrived on the ground. You've only spoken to her twice on the radio and only seen her once on the video screen, and your appearance was different. You still had your hair braided, filled with feathers and partly dyed, and the kohl in your face. Not to mention the crappy quality of the stream. Now you're just covered in dirt and blood from head to toe with only few patches of visible skin. "Yes", you finally answer, your voice is still weak and barely audible, nothing of your usual strength and fire in it.

"Where are they?"

"That is a long story", you reply with a sigh and clear your throat as you shift into a slightly more comfortable position. "One I need to tell your leader. And the commander."

"Are they safe?", Abby asks with a very worried expression.

You consider your answer for a moment. The Skaikru kids are safe, at least right now. But all the others trapped inside the mountain are anything but safe and you know it's only a matter of time before the delinquents suffer the same fate. "For now", you decide to answer and shake your head. "But I can't say for how long."

Abby nods and raises to her feet again. "Then we should better start moving. I need to get your friend to our medical anyway, what I could do for her here will only help temporary." She holds out her hand to you and you take it after short hesitation, letting her help you up. You follow her out of the dropship and see Anya lying on a self-made stretcher, guarded by two of the three men who're here with the doctor.

"Onya", you call out to your mentor and she slowly turns her head towards you, giving you her usual stoic face, but her eyes are smiling slightly at you. You shuffle closer to her and carelessly kneel down into the dirt next to her. "Ai don tel yu bilaik yu gonplei nou ste odon kom nau. ( _I told you that your fight is not over yet._ )"

"En ai don tel yu nou gon biyo _joken_ ( _And I told you not to say_ fucking)", she responds, her voice sounds hollow, her usual strength gone and replaced by a weakness due to the heavy blood loss she suffered, and even though you can practically hear her pain in the sound of her voice, you can't help but laugh at the words, because they're so true. Anya always reprimanded you when you cursed, regardless of the language you used. "Ba du yu sen gon ai in? ( _But do you listen to me?_ )", Anya turns her face back towards the sky and closes her eyes with a slight huff, though you can hear a slight flicker of sarcasm in her voice. "No. Skaigada-de get eting in beda. ( _No. The sky girl knows everything better._ )"

"Resh, Onya ( _Rest, Anya_ )", you say with a small smile and get back up. As you turn around, you notice Abby and the third guard looking at you. "I guess I can't convince you to untie me?", you raise your hands slightly as you ask the question and look between your mother and the guard who tied you in the first place.

"I'm sorry", is all Abby offers and you nod with a shrug and drop your hands, having expected a rejection. "Okay, let's move out, guys. It's a long march to Alpha Station."

You walk next to Abby as you all leave the dropship and go through the woods. Every so often you steal a few glances at your mother, take in the shape of her cheekbones, the color of her eyes, the always slightly worried expression. You remembered her slightly different, softer somehow, more smiling, but otherwise she's like you captured her in your drawings. Your memory didn't deceive you after all.

"Am I that interesting to you?", Abby questions you as you look at her yet another time and you clear your throat, instantly snapping your gaze back into the direction you're walking. "You know, it's a long walk, we might as well talk. Get to know each other." You don't say anything, not sure of what to offer, too afraid of revealing who you are. You're not ready for that yet, not out here in the open with strangers listening, anyway. "Let's start with names. You already know mine, what's yours?"

No, you can't tell her your name, she'll draw a connection, you're sure of that. The hair color, the age, the name - too many parallels. You think for a moment, not wanting to offer her nothing to call you until you tell her who you really are. "My people call me _skaigada_ ", they _do_ call you that sometimes, so it's safe and true enough for you.

"But that's not your name", Abby states knowingly, and you don't comment it.

"Jos tell em op yu tag ( _Just tell her your name_ )", Anya chimes in from behind them, lying on the stretcher and being carried by two of the guards. She made a big fuss about being carried and tried to get up to walk to the Alpha Station, but almost as soon as she stood on her own, she fell back down onto the stretcher again, the blood loss too high for her circulatory system to work properly.

"No."

"Hakom nou? Yu don tell emo goufa op. ( _Why not? You told the children._ )"

You don't answer for almost a minute, before you sigh, your eyes still directed to the front, not daring to move them to either Abby or Anya when you finally answer, too afraid they'll catch a flicker of emotion in them. "Em laik ai nomon. ( _She's my mother._ )"

Before Anya can verbally react, and though you can't see her reaction, you can practically imagine the wide eyes, agape mouth and overall shocked face, Abby interrupts their talk. "Okay, I know your language probably feels more comfortable to you, but I can't help but feel like you're planning something when you're speaking it."

"Sorry."

"So, you won't tell me your name?"

"Later", you promise her, and you mean it. You will tell her later, you have to tell her at one point anyway. And you _want_ to tell her, but you fear her reaction. Will she even believe you? Will she take you into her arms, litter you with love? Or will she reject you, not able to bear what you've become?

She accepts your answer for now, but doesn't stop with trying to gather information about you. "How old are you, then?"

The answer to this question should be safe enough, she should be able to guess your age fairly right anyway, even with all the dirt covering your face. "Eighteen." _Since yesterday_ , you add mentally.

Abby sucks in a sharp breath at the number and you aren't sure why. Maybe it reminds her of her daughter? Of you? You don't know, but when she speaks, she doesn't comment about her. "That's quite young for running around alone in the woods, fighting wild animals, and helping a hundred strangers, isn't it?"

"You sent down one hundred people younger than me, not knowing if they'd survive", you answer and the comment triggers a swift change of expressions on Abby's face. She instantly looks guilty and conflicted, and you realize the struggle she's having with the choices she made, so you quickly continue talking, hoping to erase the expression as fast as you caused it. "And down here you have to grow up fast if you want to survive."

Abby only nods at you and the rest of the walk you continue in silence. When you arrive at the Alpha Station, you were flabbergasted upon seeing the sheer size of the Ark's part crashed into the huge clearing. The people hustling around are already putting up fences and a huge sign leans against a part of the bulkhead, reading _Camp Jaha_.

"Jackson!", Abby calls out and a man in the camp instantly turns upon hearing his name and walks over to them. "Did you set up our medical yet?"

He shortly nods and points towards a big red tent right next to the entrance to Alpha Station. "Right there."

"Okay, get her inside", the doctor orders the two guard.

"What's going on here?", a man asks as he jogs over and eyes you and Anya warily. He's tall, has short wavy dark hair, brown eyes and a stubbly beard. He seems familiar, but you can't place him at all.

"We caught them when they were sneaking to the dropship, Sir", the guard next to you explains and you instantly scoff with a grand roll of your eyes, you hear the exact same reaction from Anya as she's carried towards the tent.

"If we'd have been sneaking up on you, you wouldn't have seen us", you mutter under your breath and shake your head. You move to follow Abby as she steps behind Anya into the tent, but a firm hand grasps your arms and holds you back.

"Stop right there", the tall man tells you, causing you to huff, but you oblige, not wanting to cause an unnecessary fight. "Put her into lockdown", he then orders the guard who nods and shoves you into the direction of the Station's entrance.

You're led through the hallways, it's been a very long time since you've walked across the steel floor, but the more you hear your steps echo from the walls around you, the more you remember how you walked across them up in space and dreamed of all the nature while gazing down at earth.


	19. The 100 - II

**Spoiler** Season 2, The 100: Destiny

 **Rating** T

 **Disclaimer** All rights of The 100 including the characters belong to Alloy Entertainment, Warner Bros. and Jason Rothenberg.

 **A/N** This part is set around chapter 22-27 in my story _Destiny_ (at this point not published yet), so DO NOT READ if you plan on reading it once I've put it online!

* * *

 **The 100  
Working Title: Destiny**

"What are you packing for?"

You tense upon hearing the voice from behind you and drop the can of water back onto the bed, before you turn around to meet the dark eyes of Octavia.

She's still pissed at you for everything that happened, and you can't really blame her. TonDC was hard for you, too, but without that sacrifice none of you would've survived ultimately.

But when Lexa just marched away with her army, it broke every last bit of friendly behavior Octavia had stored away for you, even though you stayed behind. It didn't matter to the brunette, because she trusted that your trust in Lexa was justified.

"I'm leaving", is all you answer her as you turn back, pick the can back up and cram it into the small backpack. Your eyes then flicker to the gun lying next to it. You hesitate for a second before you grab for it as well and holster it to your left hip. You then flick the backpack over your shoulder and walk to the entrance of the small room your mother arranged for you in Camp Jaha back when you first revealed yourself to her.

Octavia is still casually leaning against the doorframe, not moving an inch as you're standing in front of her, head held high and shoulders broad. So you just squeeze yourself past her and stumble into the dimly lit hallway.

It's empty and quiet, only your own footsteps and the ones of Octavia who follows you audible. It's not a surprise, really, since it's in the middle of the night and everyone, safe for very few guards at the outposts, is sleeping right now.

"So you abandon us?", she accuses you, causing you to stop dead in your track. You don't turn around until she continues. "Just like the commander?"

This is too much for you. You spin on your heels and stand right in front of the slightly smaller girl after three long strides. You're way too deep in her personal space and your fingers are twitching next to one of the hunting knives tucked into your belt. "What do you want from me?", you growl at her.

"The truth", she says, not backing away even an inch, though her eyes flicker to your knife for a moment.

"I've given you nothing _but_ the truth, Octavia", you huff at her and shake your head aggravated before you take a step back, then another, turn around again and continue walking. "You didn't seem to care for it thus far."

"I'm sorry, okay?", she calls after you, not missing a beat to follow you again. "Is that what you want to hear?"

You say nothing, you're not really sure what you want to hear. You're not sure if you want to hear anything at all. And that's why you're here right now, with a backpack slung over your shoulder, weapons sheeted and holstered on your clothes, and all your most important belongings stowed away in your pockets, ready to leave everyone you know behind.

You can't take it anymore. You can't take how they talk to you, try to say the right things, or avoid the wrongs. How they act, carefully not to provoke you in any way. They fear you up to a certain extent, because ultimately you're not one of them. You weren't for the past seven years.

You tried to fit in, tried to make light talk with the people you learned to know, call your friends, you tried to catch up with your mother, but you had to realize that you're not like them.

You're Trikru, only that you aren't. Not anymore.

"You can't just leave, Clarke", Octavia cuts into your line of thought as you step out of the remnants of the Alpha Station and stand in front of its entrance in the middle of Camp Jaha. She sounds pleadingly more than anything else, all the anger at you is suddenly gone.

"I don't belong here, Octavia", you sigh and turn to look her. You take in how she changed during the past two months. You take in the braids in her hair, the dark stains around her eyes, the rest of the kohl she applied for the day. You take in the clothes; battered leather and fur, and the sword strapped to her back. You realize that she's like you in a way - nothing like the Arkers. "You of all people should understand that." When she doesn't come up with another argument, you take the risk and pull her into a hug. It doesn't take even the slightest moment for Octavia to respond and throw her arms around you. Despite everything that happened, she's still your friend, you realize. Maybe the only true friend you have left in this god forsaken world. "May we meet again", you whisper and then you're just gone.


	20. The 100 - III

**Spoiler** Season 2 Episode 1-4, The 100: Destiny

 **Rating** T

 **Disclaimer** All rights of The 100 including the characters belong to Alloy Entertainment, Warner Bros. and Jason Rothenberg. This product is a one-hundred percent non-profitably project.

 **A/N** This part is set around chapter 12-15 in my story _Destiny_ (at this point not published yet), so DO NOT READ if you plan on reading it once I've put it online! It's a changed version of what I've already posted before (The 100 - I).

* * *

 **The 100  
Working Title: Destiny**

You slowly near the camp around the Alpha Station with Anya's arm around your shoulders as you steady her. You've been walking through the woods for half a day, only stopping for minutes a few times and you can feel pure exhaustion fill your body. You can't even imagine how Anya must feel, she was already heavily weakened when you found her in Mount Weather, but now she can barely stand, even though she's supported by your own last strengths. You rest at the dropship didn't really help to refill either of your energy, especially since you cut it short.

"Oso don du em ( _We did it_ )", you breathe, a wide, toothy smile plastered on your face as you laugh weakly and look over to Anya. The warrior can barely keep her eyes open, but you can see her smile as well, a rare sight you usually only see in sparring matches which makes you giggle even more.

That's when you hear a loud shot resonating from within the camp and suddenly Anya slumps next to you. "Onya!", you scream as you lie her down on the ground and frantically search for an open wound. You see the blood spill through the clothes in her right shoulder. "No, no, no", you repeat over and over again as you put pressure to the wound and search for her hazel eyes which flicker shut, then open repeatedly. "Ste kom ai ( _Stay with me_ )", you beg her, when you hear several feet approaching you.

"En's ait ( _It's okay_ )", she whispers, her voice weak. You feel her speak more than you actually hear it and you feel water fill your eyes, your sight goes heavily blurry within seconds. "Ai gonplei ste odon. ( _My fight is over_.)"

"No", you shout at her, tears now spilling down your cheeks in frustrated, upset, and angry lines. "Yu gonplei nou ste joken odon! ( _Your fight is not fucking over_!)"

"Grab her!", a woman shouts from behind you and hands reach out for your shoulders and arms to drag you away from Anya. You try to resist, try to fight them off and get back down to your mentor, your friend, but they're too strong and you're too exhausted.

You shout at them, over and over again, to let you go, to save her life, but they're just dragging you to the side and then pressing you face first into the ground, and all you're able to do is cry as you see Anya looking at you, peaceful, too peaceful.

"What's going on here?", you then hear a new voice from behind, it's female and you know it, you recall it from your memory, from years ago when you were still on the Ark and from only days ago when you heard it on the radio.

The new voice argues with the other woman, but you don't listen to their words as all you can think about is your mentor lying in the dirt, slowly but surely bleeding to death. "Please", you turn your head as much as you can and beg the woman who still has no idea who you really are, your voice heavily cracking. "Help her."

And indeed the woman crouches down next to her and inspects the wound, then the few clothes Anya's wearing and all the blood and dirt that's littering her skin. "They're not even armed and you just shoot?", she yells at one of the guards as she opens the jacket Anya wears completely and presses a cloth onto the wound. "Get her inside", she orders them, and when no one moves raises to her feet and shouts a loud "now!" that makes two of the men who are holding you down shuffle to Anya and lift her up carefully to carry her into the camp, the woman directly behind them.

The last man who's with you jolts you back up to your feet, then shoves you towards the gate as well, a woman with blonde hair tied into a pony tail is walking ahead of you. Your steps are clumsy and you stumble the way more than you actually go it, with the guard's left hand still firmly grabbing your shoulder, which you're actually thankful for because you don't think you'd be able to stand upright without this support, and the barrel of his gun pressed into your back.

He shoves you into the same big red tent the other's carried Anya into and, once inside, shackles your hands with steel wire that rubs painfully on your skin, not that you really care for the pain. Your eyes instantly fall on Anya who's lying bare up from the waist, except for the bindings covering her breasts, on a steel table, and the doctor tending the wound.

You crouch down to the floor a few meters away from them, lean against wooden post and watch them as the guard who dragged you inside stands next to you with his weapon still pointed at your head.

"Gon raun, Onya (Fight, Anya)", you whisper, the tears stopped spilling down your face but your voice still sounds wet and cracks every few syllables. Normally you wouldn't dare to let people see you in this state, but you don't even think about hiding your emotional pain right now. "Yu don nou ron of kom maun jos gon na wan op. (You didn't escape the mountain just to die.)"

"Quiet", the guard orders and pushes the barrel of his gun into the side of your face. It stings for a moment, but it has his desired effect. Although you'd love to disarm him and shove him the gun up his ass - quite literally - you don't. You're too worn out and the last bit of common sense in your head tells you that it'd be a stupid idea to attack him with Anya on the brink of death. So you stay quiet as you keep watching the doctor work, until exhaustion finally catches up to you and you fall asleep.

You wake up again to the feeling of someone touching your cheek and your instincts kick in as you instantly shoot up with your bound hands to grab for the wrist. As you open the eyes you find yourself staring right into the face of the Ark's chief medical officer, but the guard are all gone.

"It's okay", she assures you, and although there's a brief flicker of panic on her face due to your rapid reaction, she's calm. "I won't hurt you."

She doesn't even know who you are, doesn't know that you're her daughter who fled the Ark seven years ago. You find yourself questioning if she even still believes that you could actually be alive. And even though she has absolutely no information about you and no reason to trust you, she helped you, she helped Anya.

 _Anya_.

Your eyes snap to the side, instantly landing on her body on the far end of the room. "She's alive", Abby tells you with a slight smile, reading in your reaction what you're thinking and looking for, before the smile falters with a sigh. "Barely."

"Thank you", you whisper at her and then, when you realize that it's the first time in seven years, that you actually look at your mother, and she looks back at you with her kind brown eyes and tells you something simple as _it's okay_ , you just break.

You let go off her wrist and would've wrapped your arms around her, if they wouldn't still be tied together. Instead you just lean forward and begin to sob, like you didn't do in years.

"Hey, hey", she whispers and lets you hide your blood and dirt stained face in her shoulder. She carefully wraps an arm around your torso and holds you tight while she strokes the back of your head.

You never realized until now how much you needed this, just being held by your mother in a soft sway, able to let go of all the fucking tears that built up inside of you for years because you couldn't afford to cry in front of anyone before. Because you needed to be strong, always so fucking so strong for everybody.

And you were, and you _loved_ it, you really did. But just crying is the best relief you had in what feels like forever. And you don't even notice the words that slip from your lips, barely audible. "I missed you so much." But Abby catches them and suddenly her stroking stops, her muscles tense.

As soon as you notice the change in her body language, you realize what you've whispered at her and pull yourself out of her grasp. You look down, try to hide your face, your tears, your pain. Abby catches your chin though, her touch is soft, but forceful nonetheless as she raises your head back up and searches your eyes for something, anything.

She just stares at you what feels like minutes, and probably really _are_ minutes. "Clarke?", she asks you, her voice is low, confused, but you catch a very small hint of hope in it as well.

And suddenly you're swamped with memories of your whole life, of the Ark and of the ground alike. Memories of your parents and Wells, but also of your family within the Trikru, of Anya, Lincoln, and Lexa, and of the hundred, of Octavia, Jasper, and Monty, of Bellamy, Finn, and Raven. They're all inside your head and make you feel so much that you can't handle it.

When you speak, your voice cracks and is thick with emotion. With all of it, with pure joy that you escaped the mountain men and that you're finally rejoined with your mother, with fear that she'll abandon you because she can't stand what you've become and that all of your friends and people are going to die in the mountain, with anger because of everything that happened in the last week, because of the realization that in the end you couldn't save anyone at all. "Hi, mom."

You close your eyes and more tears brim out of between your lids. When you open them again, Abby strokes your cheek with her thumb, her eyes are wide and shimmer with unshed tears. Her lips are slightly parted and tremble, as if she wants to say something, but just doesn't know what. "Is that really you?", her voice sounds just as broken as yours in this moment and all you can do is nod, before she pulls you into another hug, so much stronger and tighter than the one before.

Because whereas the former hug was to calm you down, this one is for everything _she_ feels right now, all the joy, the pain, the confusion. Your body still jumps every few seconds because of the heavy sobs that escape you.

After a while she loosens the embrace and leans back, she doesn't let go of you completely though, but brushes her hands up and down your arms. Her eyes have calmed down and her mouth is formed into a content smile now. "How's that possible?"

"Anya would say due to my typical dumb luck", you chuckle slightly when that is the first response that pops into your head.

"En ai na ste radon ( _And I'd be right_ )", the weakened voice of Anya suddenly fills the room and you snap your whole body to the side to look at her past your mother's head with a huge grin on your face.

"Jok yu op ( _Fuck you_ )", you call out to your mentor and she slowly turns her head towards you, giving you her usual stoic face, but her eyes are smiling back at you. "Ai don shoun oso raun au kom maun, nami? ( _I did guide us out of the mountain, right?_ )"

"Sha ( _Yes_ )", she scoffs, her voice sounds hollow, her usual strength gone and replaced by a weakness due to the heavy blood loss she suffered. "En ai don tel yu nou gon biyo jok ( _And I told you not to say fuck_ )", she continues and even though you can practically hear her pain in the sound of her voice, you can't help but laugh at the words, because they're so true. Anya always reprimanded you when you cursed, regardless of the language you used. "Ba du yu sen gon ai in? ( _But do you listen to me?_ )", Anya turns her face back towards the sky and closes her eyes with a slight huff, though you can hear a slight flicker of sarcasm in her voice. "No. Klark get eting in beda. ( _No. Clarke knows everything better_.)"

"Ai du op ( _I do_ )", you argue, causing her to look at you again, with a very skeptical face. "Ai don tel yu bilaik yu gonplei nou ste odon kom nau. Ai don ste ait, em don kep yu sonraun klin ( _I told you that your fight is not over yet. I was right, she saved your life_ )", you continue, and nod to your mother. " _Ha hashta_ mochof? ( _How about_ thank you?)"

You can't help but laugh at the look that Anya gives you now. "Shof op ( _Be quiet_ )", she grits out through clenched teeth.

"Even I understood what that last one meant", your mother says.

Still a smile on your face, you turn to look back at your mother. "Thank you again. For not just letting her die."

You receive a nod and then there's her hand again, brushing against your dirty cheek, but suddenly the smile on your mother's face falters and a frown begins to form and deepen. "Where's your father?"

Dread settles in your stomach upon the realization that you have to tell your mother, only minutes after she learned that her daughter is still alive, that her husband died all those years ago. You drop your head slightly, and your whole expression turns to one of sorrow as you avert your eyes, giving her the answer without any words already. "He died when we hit the ground."

"I see", is all she says, and its surprisingly relatively emotionless. She then shakes her head and offers a small smile again. "I never thought I'd see either one of you _ever_ again."

Before you can say something, another person enters the tent. It's the woman from earlier. The tall blonde guard has a riffle in her hands and looks at you with a threat in her eyes that it actually causes a small shiver down your spine. For some reason, this woman really doesn't like you. At all.

"Ma'am, for safety reasons I must advise you to let me move the prisoner to the lockup", she says after turning to your mother who's still crouched in front of you, and by the look of the tiredness in your mother's eyes upon hearing these words, it seems that it isn't the first time she's getting this advice.

"She's not a prisoner, she's my daughter", she says after a moment, then stands up and turns to the blonde. "Free her."

To say that the guard looks severely shocked would be quite the understatement. "Ma'am?"

"Now, Major Byrne."

The major looks down at you, to your mother and back down to you again before she slowly walks closer. She tucks her rifle to the side and takes a small side cutter from her belt with which she cuts the wire around your wrists.

"I appreciate it", you nod your thanks at the woman and slowly rub your sore skin, trying to smooth it out. In a very slow and clumsy move you get back up to your feet, your mother catches you on half the way to help you.

The major doesn't leave the tent again, but at least takes a few steps back to give you space. Her finger lies dangerously close to the trigger of her rifle though as she watches you closely.

You couldn't care less though as you stumble across the small area towards the table Anya is leaning on. She's still topless, besides the dirty bindings across her breasts. Her right shoulder is bandaged, as well as her left arm, where she bit the transmitter out.

You reach out and lie your hand directly above the bandage on the arm. Anya's eyes snap open again and hazel stares up to you. "Oso don du em ( _We did it_ )", she repeats the words you said when you reached the camp, before exhaustion takes over again and causes her to close the eyes. She doesn't fall asleep though.

"Did any of the hundred make it here?", you ask your mother after a few seconds, turning to her just in time to see realization set in.

" _You_ were the grounder who was with them."

You only nod as an answer, then point to Anya. "Well, we both in the end. And a third one." The third one being Lincoln of course, wherever he is now. You only know that Bellamy said he went to protect Octavia. You just hope that they were far enough away when all hell broke loose.

"Six of them did it", your mother says after a while, and you swiftly calculate the numbers in your head.

Six of them made it to the remnants of the Ark. Forty-seven are kept in Mount Weather. One, being Octavia, is off somewhere with Lincoln - hopefully at least, and Murphy ran off into the woods. That means twenty-seven either died in the final battle or are scattered in the woods.

"Do you know where the rest is?", the major asks you, taking a step forward. She still has the slight hostile vibe towards you, but you ignore it as you nod your head.

"Mount Weather, forty-seven of them."

"You took them to Mount Weather?"

"No", you furrow your brow and shake your head, angry at her even contemplating that you'd do something like that. "We were held there captive ourselves."

"By who?"

"Mountain men", Anya mutters from besides you and opens her eyes to stare at Byrne. Then she looks to you, moves her hand up and grips your forearm. "We need to save them, Clarke." You know that she's actually speaking about the grounders held captive inside those hundreds cages, not the delinquents, but it doesn't really matter right now.

You nod at her and cover the hand that holds to your arm. "I need to speak to the chancellor", you say, turning your head to your mom who smiles at you with a nod.

"You do."

That catches you by surprise, and it's clearly shown on your face, because from what Raven told you, she isn't even on the council anymore. "What happened to Jaha and Kane?"

"Jaha died on the Ark. And Kane went to speak to the grounder's commander, he took a prisoner to lead him the way."

 _Oh fuck_ , you instantly think as your eyes widen and you turn your head to Anya, who has the exact same look on her face. "Why?"

"To negotiate for peace."

"But we _are_ at peace", you grumble, first confused, but then you understand. "Something happened."

"One of them held four of the hundred captive, and we thought they took the rest, too."

"Tristan", you mutter under your breath and shake your head. "Disha nomonjoking natrona. ( _This motherfucking traitor_.)"

"A group is out there searching for them now."

"You need to get them back", you shout instantly. If they think the Trikru took their friends, then all hell will break loose. They'll probably search in the villages and upon not finding them react badly. The trust between the Trikru and the hundred is fragile to say the least, and with you not there to tell them that they _can_ be trusted, you doubt that it will last long.

"I can't."

You sigh heavily as you lean against the table and look at Anya. Her hazel eyes look back up to you and she nods in a silent understanding. "When did Kane leave?"

"Yesterday, in the morning."

He is almost two days ahead of you, that means you'll never reach him in time. If he didn't do too many stops on the way, he'll arrive in Polis sometime tomorrow. And even with a horse you'd need a day ride.

"You think they'll kill him", your mother states, her voice wavers slightly, but you shake your head.

"No", Lexa wouldn't just kill him, mostly because she would want your opinion on anything concerning the people who fell from the sky. "But I doubt he'll be treated too well."


End file.
